


An Indefinite Epitaph

by Nemonus



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: America metaphors, Betrayal, F/M, Gen, NaNoWriMo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-30
Updated: 2014-03-10
Packaged: 2017-11-19 22:10:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 17
Words: 82,214
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/578180
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nemonus/pseuds/Nemonus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Connie wanted to join the army and then she wanted to tear it apart. In between she wanted to be liked. The Freelancer Program was designed to resurrect the dead, equip elite soldiers with strength augmentations, and make her latter two goals difficult. Project Freelancer from CT's perspective.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for my NaNoWriMo novel in 2012 and will be longer than 50,000 words. In my computer the file is called "Makes Me Sound Like A Freaking NaNo".
> 
> A lot of the headcanon and the fact that I wrote this at all is indebted to Ree, chii, and the rest of RoosterTumblr. 
> 
> York and North are listening to "Ships" by Redbird.
> 
> "Merricat, said Connie, would you like a cup of tea?  
> Oh no, said Merricat, you’ll poison me.  
> Merricat, said Connie, would you like to go to sleep?  
> Down to the boneyard ten feet deep?"
> 
> Shirley Jackson

      The world narrowed around the girl, teetering, and she kept her balance.

    The room was filled with people and the sounds of metal and absence. With the missing members of the team gathered in the gaps like ghosts in her head the girl looked to the side inside her mask and blinked. Her hands blurred and became watery reflections as she activated her cloak. Agent Texas reared back and hunched again, heaving back and forth through the battle with all the weighty grace of a rattlesnake striking, and the axe-head bobbed. It caught in Tex’s hand at the end of the arc, and she threw the blade forward.

    The girl had calculated correctly.  

    She ducked out of the way as she saw her hologram phase into being beside her, the angular brown armor heavily shadowed.   

    Texas flicked her wrist, a tiny, quick movement too subtle for the girl to have expected it to come from those slow metal hands, and the axe blade slashed forward.   

    For a moment, the girl existed in two places, one real and one false and projected.

    The axe missed, did not miss, missed again, the possibilities fighting it out in her head.

    Missed, did not miss.

    The girl felt the world tip over.

* * *

                         
    The girl grew up at the end of a dirt lane in Rhode Island. One long weekend her mother took her to northern Connecticut to find a waterfall that had been painted in a storybook. They found it: green trees and the white stream spraying over the rocks. The storybook had been illustrated by a man the girl’s mother had taken art classes with in college. He made money by being an artist. The girl’s mother did not. Later the girl would think about her mother standing inside the storybook scene and wondering which brush stroke separated her from her friend and his success, which side of which leaf she had failed to capture. The girl thought this many years later. On that long weekend she asked if she could stand under the waterfall. Her mother said yes, and the girl walked into the pool of water next to the waterfall and stood there for some time before ducking under the fall and finding her footing on a round-backed rock slippery with green algae. The waterfall did not dislodge her from the rock or push her down into a girl-colored pancake as she had suspected. The water was so cold and so all-surrounding that it faded away into the background, and what dominated her senses was its sound.  

   The dirt lane was not so long that the girl and her mother and father could not walk into town on the fourth of July. Store fronts were decorated with bright yellow awnings and ranks of flags, still in sconces but so many that they seemed to march down the road in parade, undulating in the wind. Her parents lead her to the shore and they looked at the coast line, smelling salt and weathered rock.

    There are moments like this that got caught in the back of her head, lurking like dreams but never quite coming out into the open in any form as blatant as sleep. They made her, and they became the things she wanted to leave behind.  
                   

* * *

  
    The girl was average in elementary school, perhaps known more than the others for sitting on step stools in the corner of the library and disappearing after the teacher had led everyone out to the next class. She read about history, the presidents, the moon, and the Loch Ness Monster. Her hair was long and brown.   

She did not cut it until high school. In high school she was average, made a few close friends, and also read, although she had learned not to become so distracted. She never took to fiction. Although she liked the action of reading, fiction felt too nebulous and variable. Nonfiction was full of comfortably unchanging information.

    In high school she met the first recruiter. The war was a shove on her shoulder, her friend saying “Look what they’re doing.”

    They were doing pushups in the rust-and-cream checkered hall of the high school.

    The girl thought that she should be able to do enough pushups to win a t-shirt, and when she did her friend smiled at her and bent down to the floor while the girl was handed a white shirt with UNSC printed on the front in gaudy green and yellow. The girl looked at the soldier’s uniform and cropped hair and thought about the fact that there really was no war: the army was just protecting people out in the vastness of space, although there were mutterings about colonies discussed in board rooms and dining rooms.

    She thought about the histories of the UNSC, how it had been formed when Earth unified, and how many people had protested any force having singular power: she thought about the stories of presidents meeting with army chiefs in back rooms. She thought about the Office of Naval Intelligence and its leader, Admiral Margaret Paragonsky, whose name she vaguely remembered as the crux of hundreds of accusations and tall tales and conspiracy theories.

    The girl joined the UNSC because she thought that she could be good at it. She got good grades and she had won a t-shirt. She joined because she thought it would make her a better person to cut her hair and put on a uniform that was not gaudy. She joined because she thought that she would be able to get away from her home town easily if she did so.

    When she joined up she did not think that she would be transferred very far; only as far as the stars whose names her parents recognized.

    Even before she went into space she cried and raged and fought her way through boot camp, made friends, walked down some corridors she was not supposed to walk down, and was pulled out of line by an officer with an instinct that the girl did not have, who said that she would be good at computer slicing and security work.

    She thought this was a veiled insult.

    Standing straight in front of a teak desk with her hands behind her and her name pinned to her lapel she said, “I thought I was going to be outfitted for combat, sir,” and the officer (older, white-haired, no one she knew very well or had shouted at her before) looked at her with gray-blue eyes.

    “You are,” he said. “But we feel that your talents would be useful elsewhere. A new program is recruiting and looking for troops with multiple specialities. You may be a candidate.”

    The idea of an elite program sustained her as she sat in classrooms with tens of other uniformed soldiers, learning about programming and surveillance and hologram technology. Some of these were desperately boring: others were so interesting that she would lie awake thinking about them.

    Just when she started thinking about how she could apply them to the base she lived in, she got a call.

    The base commander stood in a room with five chairs. Three were occupied by other soldiers in clamshell-white dress uniforms. When the girl sat down she glanced at her companions’ faces and looked attentively into the eyes of her superior.

    He said, “I would like to introduce you to Doctor Leonard Church,” and activated a screen on a wall. Doctor Church was dark-haired and dark-glassesed and dark-shouldered. The girl could see nothing else of him and very little in the grayness behind him, although she guessed by the color that he was on a spaceship.  

    He told them about a program called Freelancer, sponsored by and overseen but not directly linked to the UNSC. He asked them to sign. He said, in a thick Southern drawl, that he would pick one of them. “Volunteers will be chosen from various branches of the force, for a diverse group of elite soldiers.”

    The girl perked up at the word “elite”. She thought that if she had this attached to her name, she would wear it like a rank blaze.

    Two days later, she was chosen.

    She wrote home.

    She went to the spaceport, in the heart of Texas, and waited with her bag over her shoulder.

    Years later she would think of York wandering across the tarmac with a mustard-yellow duffel bag, a color he somehow made look natural, and Connie wondering where the cameras were, but at the time he had no name that she knew and the girl watched the way his jacket bunched up at his neck.

    They were waiting for a shuttle to take them to Doctor Church’s ship, and another man stood some distance away in a black coat with very straight sides, a square-edged suitcase at his feet. She had thought at first that he was there for a different shuttle entirely, since he had arrived so early and stood so apart and waited so quietly.

    “Hey man,” said the man with the yellow bag, and the girl turned around.

    He said, “I’m James Murray,” and held out a hand for her to shake. She did. She told him her name and he nodded at her, then up at the stars. (James Murray had long ago discovered his ability to give a bro nod to the universe, and had lived his life with the universe’s benevolent blessing ever since.)

    “So,” he said, and leaned back, settling into himself. “You here for the Church project?”

    “I’m devout,” she said, and watched the skin around his big brown eyes crinkle. James Murray was effortlessly handsome.

    He didn’t seem to get the joke. “Okay. Which ship are we taking, huh?” He looked around at the parked shuttles with their dark shadows. The girl saw another figure approaching across the tarmac, and the man leaning against a wall few benches away heaved himself off the wall and moved over to join the group as if he had only just realized they were there for the same thing.

    The next person to introduce herself was a red-haired woman with green eyes so bright it was almost nacreous. The girl wanted to ask whether they were contacts, but she doubted it. The woman’s hair was a vivid color but had been bound up to military regulation, and only the spiky edges showed around her forehead and the back of her neck. She wore the hood of her black sweatshirt up.

    James Murray put his back to the girl. “So,” he said to the red-haired woman, slowing the words down. “You are here for the Church project.”

    “Yes I am,” said the woman. She gave her name.

    “May I welcome you,” said James Murray, “to this beautiful tarmac.” He looked around as if for the accessories to the party he was about to throw. “And this...” He extended a hand, included the second man who had, suddenly and quietly, gotten closer to the rest of the group. “Is another one of us?”

    “David Baskerville,” the second man said, quietly but firmly. His jacket's very square shoulders that revealed almost nothing about the thin body underneath. The girl turned to the red-haired woman and looked her up and down. She wore a blue bracelet made of small turquoise stones.     

    “Hi,” said the girl, and extended her hand. They shook quickly. The other woman was shorter than the girl, and thinner, but carried herself with an unbreakable air. The girl sized her up and saw her doing the same and was struck that they were both competing already. Something didn’t click. The girl turned away thinking that the woman had already done better than her in some ephemeral social ranking system.   

    Maybe they could be friends, one day, but for now her thought was _she is so much better at this than me._    

    James Murray had gotten David Baskerville to throw back his hood. The morning was cold; the girl understood why the woman was keeping hers on. The sun had risen but was not doing much to shine through the thick gray clouds in the wide, empty Texas sky.    

David Baskerville had flat, pale lips and a round face that gave him a generally genial appearance; his eyes were bright blue and his eyelids lazy. He looked like he wasn’t quite sure where he was, but his eyes darted from person to person, fixing absolutely on each of them for a moment as if he were memorizing their faces.

    They talked about what branch they were from, and what state. Murray was from Oregon. He told them all about his brothers, three kids in a young family and how they would run around the city to the waterfront, and he really was good at telling stories. His words roller-coastered and dipped like starships and she found herself staring at the tarmac quite a lot until another group of people arrived, headed by bare-headed twins with blonde hair, and then lights started blinking inside the tarmac and they all moved back, going from casual conversationalists in front of a bus stop to soldiers who knew the code written in the lights.

    The Pelican came down without fanfare and sat on the runway, creaking.

    The pilot, in a white helmet with angel wings nodding at her temple, stayed inside, seeming to listen to a radio station with a strong beat that only she could hear. The man who walked out of the back ramp was not the doctor. Instead, he was a round-faced black man in a slick black coverall.

    “Please,” he said in a laconic tone that was almost a whisper, “present your identification.”

    The girl ended up in line between the female twin with the pink-tipped hair and a tall man with a thick, black mustache. She drank in her last glimpses of Texas hungrily.

    The man in black looked at her UNSC ID for as long as he had looked at the others’. He said her name. He let her into the ship, where she sat on the hard seat and pulled the restraints down in front of her.

    The pilot had talked and joked at them, bantering with Murray. The girl had watched the little she could see of the stars and wondered whether it was everyone else’s first time in space too. The Pelican took them to a capitol ship that floated black and green and decorated with pinpricks of red lights, the name in ten-foot high letters stenciled on the side. The girl felt disoriented, than ecstatically and thoroughly at home. She had joined the army because she had wanted to be in space, and now, earlier than expected, she had arrived.

    As soon as they got to the _Mother of Invention_ , the counselor would take their names away.

    The girl did not know this yet.    

    The military, though, conditioned people to do things they did not understand, and to follow orders the end result of which they did not know, so when the group marched into a hangar and then a small room without ever seeing a hallway of the frigate they had docked with, the girl stood in front of a map of the United States with the states clearly marked out and saw her new name on it, and drank that in too.

    “So,” Murray muttered. “What did Delaware?”

    “What?” said Baskerville, loudly as if he hadn’t heard, and the red-haired woman whipped her head around to fix him with a stare as if she were his drill sergeant.

    The male twin’s quieter ‘what’ actually acknowledged the joke. He was standing a few feet to the girl’s left, and she couldn’t help but turn her head to look at him.

    “A New Jersey!” Murray whispered, loud and self-congratulatory, but the girl couldn’t help but smile at the way she could hear his own smile in his voice.    

    Doctor Leonard Church stepped out in front of the map. “Welcome,” he said, “to Project Freelancer. It is called this because we are overseen by but separate from the UNSC.” He pronounced the letters slowly, as if he were the first person in the universe to declare them meaningful. His thick accent made the girl wonder what state he was from. Texas? Louisiana? She did not know. He was not from Rhode Island.       

“What you will find here is an exceptional program designed to turn you into the best soldiers the corps has to offer.”

    People muttered, the female twin letting out a sharp “Yessss.” The red-haired woman did not speak, but stared fixedly ahead, tracking Church’s small movements as he swayed back and forth. Otherwise, he stayed behind the podium.   

“As director of this program,” he said, “You will report to me. You have already met my counselor. We are not technically a military organization, although we are, for all intents and purposes, revolutionizing war. Your ranks do not matter here.”

    More muttering. The girl looked straight ahead. She did not have a high enough rank for this to concern her greatly, although she was not sure how it would be put in practice. It made all of them equal, responsible only to the Director, the Counselor who had met them in the Pelican, and themselves.

    “Why is there a map?” She heard Baskerville wonder, and a moment later, the director explained.

    “You will each be given code names.” Again the words were slow, filled with gravitas. Please see the councilor for your names.”

    He nodded his head and walked out, quickly, as if wanting to disappear into the shadows at the edge of the room.

    “That was brief,” said she girl before she could stop herself, and the female twin laughed too loudly. Baskerville looked at them both as if shocked they had spoken up. Murray shoved and cajoled to the front of the line, and the girl found herself between an older man and the twins.

    Their names were the names of states: she found this out as soon as Murray left the stage near the counselor, because the New York on the map glowed green. Murray sauntered across the room and stood with his arms folded by a hall.

    Everyone moved slowly up the line toward the councilor, and more states lit up. The girl wondered which she would get, and how they were chosen. Murray was New York, this was very clear: he was loud and brash and pleasantly boisterous, and she wondered what his dark side looked like, what fires and floods and messes cluttered up his past.

    She craned her neck to see what name the red-haired woman got, could not hear the words, and looked up at the map instead. Almost as soon as the woman stepped up in front of the counselor both North and South Carolina glowed. The girl furrowed her brow, wondering: two? Why did she get two? Had she missed something?

    Then the man in front of her became Florida, and the girl stepped up to the Counselor and stood with her hands at her sides, like a proper soldier, and looked up a few inches to his eyes.

    He did not look directly at her. In his hands he gingerly held a large datapad, and he looked from it to over his shoulder at the screen behind him, only grazing the option of meeting her eyes.

    “Hello,” he said.

    “Hello sir,” she replied, surprised by the informality.

    “You have been assigned...” and he waited, looking between the screens, making her wonder whether the names really were an arbitrary decision. Would there really be fifty elite soldiers here on the ship?

    (And why had she been declared elite? This thought nestled gently in the back of the girl’s mind, to emerge at a quieter time.)

    “Connecticut,” he said, and she stared up at the small state so close to her own. So close. For some reason, that felt important.

    She said, “Thank you sir.”

    They stood at ready in the line, unwilling to chat while an officer was present, but she could see in the way Murray’s lips twitched and Baskerville’s eyes widened that they wanted to talk about what they had gotten. The woman - the Carolinas - remained staring straight ahead. Connecticut tried to make eye contact with the female twin, who so far had looked like the friendlier woman, but could not without leaning out of line. Connecticut, she thought. She could not remember much of its history to associate it with. All of her friends had been from Rhode Island.     

    When they were all in line again the director reappeared, quietly. He simply stood by the podium while the counselor told them all to follow this hall down to their quarters and that they would find a locker room further down, and that most of the doors were locked. He told them the amount of crew the ship had, that it had medical, lecture halls, mess, an AI named Alpha and pilots and engineers and had not seen battle before. He told them that their real work would start tomorrow. He told them that they could sleep while they got the chance, and Connecticut remembered the cloud-blurred morning sky over Texas and realized that they had a day, an entire day to themselves. This was unheard of in the military, this was summer camp, this was --

    The director saluted, sloppily, and the elite of the UNSC, who had just been told that they were getting a whole day’s vacation, saluted too, with a thunderous snap of heels.

    Connecticut thought that she would like this ship, but also suspected that it was too good to be true.

    The group marched out of the room: they dissolved out of line after that, at first hesitant and then with Murray stomping along at the front they became a group that felt less like the military and more like a high school field trip.

    The counselor had been right about the locked doors. Murray - New York stopped at a few and idly stroked the controls before passing on, deciding that this was not the door they had been directed to. One turned out to be a closet, getting genial laughs from the group as New York peered in at a mop and bucket.

    Then, a doorway on the left led to a room probably sixteen feet long and eight feet wide, all bare dark metal with green running lights, and smaller doorways lining the walls. There was a wall in the front that prevented them from seeing the room immediately, but they could go around it to either side and see. A worn but plushy-looking dark green couch sat facing the wall.

    “This is incredible,” said the Carolinas, and Connecticut felt like she was speaking for all of them. Rooms this big - and with this much privacy - were unheard of. The director must have something up his sleeve if he had offered this. What was their job going to be like? Connecticut had to think that the room was a compensation for something. How many of them would be walking in here with blood on their shoes?   

That was to be expected, though. This was war.

    But it was beginning to feel like summer camp.    

    New York disappeared into a room. “Man, you could fit anything in here. Whose tuba is this?” He said, muffled, and Baskerville started to follow him. At the threshold, New York backed out of the room. “Just kidding. Don’t go in there. That’s the girls’ room.”

    Baskerville blushed ferociously, and the male twin chuckled. Connecticut moved over to the doorway and saw that there were nameplates written in the same dark black metal. This one said Carolina and Connecticut.

    “Hey,” she said. “We’re here.” She looked for Carolina, whose name was apparently singular. She had her back to Connecticut, looking into another room while the big bald man whose state she did not yet know looked on. He looked tough, but not brutish. He would have been a good New York too: maybe he was New Jersey, or Texas, if the names really matched their personalities.

    “So,” said the male twin, putting one hand on the couch and the other on his sister’s shoulder. He had already shed his leather jacket and was wearing a purple t-shirt. “What are your names? I am North Dakota,” he introduced himself like an emcee. “And this is my sister, South.”

    “Yeah,” said South, by way of greeting.

    “We aren’t going to use our real names?” said Baskerville. He was wearing a black button-down shirt.

    “It’s like a fresh start,” said a tall man who had stayed near the back of the group. “I’m Utah, by the way, and I think there are other rooms down the hall. All the names aren’t on here.”

    The bald man grunted and knocked with his knuckles on a door that said Washington and Maine.

    “Fine,” said Baskerville, looking unsettled. Connecticut wasn’t sure why he was so antsy, but she also understood: she could feel the same emotions inside her, refusing to come out. She had too much pride for that.

    Baskerville said calmly, “I’m Agent Washington.”

    “Our nation’s capitol,” said New York. York had shucked his jacket when Connecticut hadn’t been looking, and now wore a yellow Grifball t-shirt.

    “Or just a state in the northwest,” said Washington, seeming to gain some composure now that he knew he was right about something.

    This did not phase New York. “Are you authoritative? Do you like taxes?”

    “I...” said Wash.

    She met Washington by her door, him standing straight and her leaning against the doorframe because she felt like she ought to have an anchor or something. “Don’t you think this is strange?” she said. “He gave us so much.”

    “This isn’t a usual project,” he said. “I have a feeling we might see stranger things before we get through.”

    His foresight was one of the first things that drew her to him.

    “Maine,” said the bald man, and everyone looked at him. He had small blue eyes under bumpy brows.

    “I’m Wyoming,” said the mustached man in an unexpected and ridiculous British accent: Connecticut thought at first that he was mocking it. New York smiled, and South Dakota actually laughed quietly but explosively before shutting herself up. Wyoming continued unfazed. “Who is Florida?”

    “That’s me, my friend,” said another older man, and bounded over to Wyoming. Florida had skinny arms and such a happy countenance that Connecticut wondered when he had been drugged.

    Washington moved away from her to look inside his room with Maine.

    “What about you?” said North Dakota kindly, and looked at her.

    She said, “Connecticut.”

    “Connecticut,” he repeated happily, as if it was the first time he had ever heard the word and he liked it.

    New York smiled. “So,” he said to the redhead. She put her back to Connecticut. “I can see why they gave you two states. You’re too much for just one,” he drawled like a late-night DJ, and Carolina stiffened. Connecticut could see her spine bend.

    “I guess that’s why,” she said, haughtily, and turned and went into her room. Connecticut followed, looking for a place to put her kit bag down. Carolina took the left-hand bed, the one nearer the door. They were proper beds, not cots, with storage space underneath and the whole thing looking like it had been built right into the ship. Connecticut ran her hands over the dark blue sheets reverently. This really was incredible, compared to the usual bare-bones living quarters that soldiers got used to.    

   “He looks familiar,” Carolina muttered, and Connecticut sat down on her own bed and faced the woman she was going to room with.

    “Did you really get two states?” She asked.   

“Looks like it,” said Carolina, neatly and forcefully folding clothing in drawers, and she did not comment further.   

“Why?”

   Carolina turned and faced her. Her hair framed her face nicely, although there was a haughtiness to her chin that made her look wrinkled. Her eyes looked almost computerized, but the sum impression was that she was beautiful.

    This annoyed Connecticut, who remembered New York’s flirtatious words and wondered how Carolina had established herself in the group so quickly.

    Carolina said, “I don’t know.”

    South Dakota poked her head in. Connecticut noticed that the tips of her white-blonde hair were dyed a light purple, and wondered how she had gotten that past regulation. Maybe she hadn’t seen combat. That would be unusual...but if Director Church wasn’t going to be paying much attention to hair regulations, maybe Connecticut would try to grow hers out again. Just cutting it off made more sense than trying to take care of it.

    North and York followed South as if they were headed somewhere purposeful, and Conencticut gravitated to the door while Carolina remained on her side of the room.

    “Where are you going?” she asked, and with a smile in his voice New York said, “To find the kitchen!”

    “It isn’t summer camp,” Connecticut said, and Maine passed by her like a freight train, trailing the metallic smell of the room.

    She turned back to Carolina. “Are you coming?”

    Carolina held her gaze for a long moment. “No.”

    Connecticut watched her for a moment, wondering whether it was vulnerability or something else that she was showing at this moment, and then followed the others.

    Washington trailed the group. “Wait up, Wash,” she said, following him and mangling his name. North Dakota looked back at her fondly.    

They explored. They were a big ragged group who walked like soldiers when white-armored support staff entered the hallways. More doors were locked than open, and Connecticut couldn’t help but think that they were penned in as surely as babies in a crib.    

But the doors that were unlocked lead to a mess hall with far more tables than there were soldiers; an exercise room, a small, drab kitchen stocked with coffee and ration bars, and even a tiny greenhouse, large enough to walk seven paces across and packed with vegetable and fruit trees and one tiny swatch of grass lit by a lamp that accurately, probably to a photon, replicated Earth’s natural sunlight. The occasional door lead to familiar marked byways: this way to the hangars, this way to the mustering room. There was even a recreation room with a couch and a folded, cloth movie screen, a tiny wireless player ready to receive data chips.

    The team grew tired and giddy and almost forgot they were on a ship. The _Mother of Invention_ moved smoothly through space.

    Connecticut watched the others as they explored, just like she watched the locked doors.

    The ship reminded them forcefully of itself when Carolina stepped one foot down a darkened hallway and met the ship’s dumb AI.   

    A panel brightened, displayed a symbol of three angled lines like a Y or the interior of a peace sign.

    “Hello,” said a female voice. It sounded a bit like it had been disturbed, or caught in the middle of something. (Later, Connecticut would notice that his was a core difference between FILSS and Alpha. FILSS sounded put-upon, out of place. Alpha sounded earthy and very present and placed, which was why it was disturbing when he was uprooted.)   

Carolina shied back a little, her ponytail flopping. The wall panel said, “Thank you for activating the Freelancer Integrated Logistics and Security System. You may call me F.I.L.S.S. It is a pleasure to meet you.”     

    Carolina looked at the panel from under furrowed brows. She pronounced the acronym like a human name. “Hello, Phyllis.”

    “My systems identify you as Freelancer Agent Carolina. Welcome back.”

    Everyone crowded around, York propping an elbow on South’s shoulder. She shrugged it off with a huff, and he leaned his arm on North’s shoulder instead.       
    “What do you mean, welcome back?” Connecticut said.

    Washington commented before she got an answer, and she looked at him for a moment. He seemed glare-proof. “I thought this ship’s AI was called Alpha,” Washington said.

    FILSS said, “My systems identify you as Freelancer Agent Washington. Welcome. The Alpha is the _Mother of Invention_ ’s smart AI.” Her voice got prissier. “I am a dumb AI, although I seem to have been programmed to feel mildly offended at that term. Would you find that offensive, Agent Washington?”

    Wash raised one arm to scratch at the back of his neck. “Um...I don’t know?”

    “Can you show us around?” Carolina asked.

    “You have all ready explored a large portion of the ship.”

    “It looked bigger from the outside,” North said.

    Connecticut said, “You mean the public portions.”

    “Yes. Other areas are used for engineering or training. I am sure the Director will introduce you to those sections eventually. He is here to help you save the universe, after all.”

    None of them needed to ask who it needed to be saved from, although using the entire universe to refer to the portions of the Milky Way Galaxy that humanity had explored was a bit hyperbolic. Since Connecticut had joined the military, the Insurrection had grown up against it. Although she had not known it at the time she had been part of one of the large classes of UNSC graduates who had, unknowingly and unapologeticly, contributed to the massive international and interplanetary power the UNSC held. The rebellious colonies that had loosely allied to form the group called the Insurrection had reacted against the UNSC’s perceived overabundance of power.

    Connecticut thought they were just angry and bored, but she also acknowledged that she had never been to an outer colony. The cliche was of farmers, like the Wild West but quieter, on carefully terraformed planets, prone to being provincial and uneducated. They also produced a good deal of food that was sent back to Earth.

    Carolina said, “Nice to meet you, FILSS,” speaking in a tone that was cheerier and more open than Connecticut had heard her sound to a person so far.  

    “The pleasure is all mine. Do you need any assistance, Agent Carolina?”

    “I don’t think so,” said Carolina, and looked around the group as if to poll them for their collective answer to the question. Connecticut recognized this as good leadership: although Carolina was not personable, she was inclusive. Already Connecticut had been assuming that she would be the leader of the group, the popular one per se - York’s reaction to her had solidified that, and Carolina would, to Connecticut’s initial displeasure, probably be good at it.    

(Connecticut did not like to see authority collapse in general: if she had, she would never have joined the army. However, she fostered strong opinions about the people in authority - namely, that she feared and did not understand them because she had never been one. Combined with the feeling that she had perhaps gone back to high school, or never left it - did anyone ever leave high school in their mind? - she was not nursing incredibly positive feelings toward Carolina. She was not dreading them rooming together, although she saw that as a possibility in the not-too distant future. She would have to wait and see.)

    While Connecticut had been having these quick thoughts, Carolina had continued.

    “We’re just looking around the ship.”

    “You are welcome to,” said the AI.

    “There are some pretty heavy-duty electronic locks on these doors,” New York said appreciatively.

    “This a military vessel.” FILSS managed to convey that she was shrugging somewhere just by the tone of her voice. “The _Mother of Inventio_ n follows standard safety protocols.”

    “The director said we were separate from the UNSC,” said York.

    “That is correct. There are many independent programs working to create a final solution for the war. It’s all very exciting.”   

“So we’ll still be fighting the colonies?” said South.

    “That is correct. Insurrection forces will be our primary targets, although the _Mother of Invention_ has not yet been tested in combat. I will receive further training just like you will, over the next few weeks. This is a very forward-thinking program.”   

“So why doesn’t the Alpha talk to us?” Washington kept on his former train of thought.

    “He will, I am sure. While I run the ship, he coordinates personnel and mission schedules with the director.”

    “I see,” said Carolina. “We’ll leave you now. Don’t want to ask too many questions.”

    Again she looked back over the group. Connecticut thought frantically of any other questions that she had, just to show Carolina that she didn’t have authority over them, but there wasn’t anything else she could think of to ask. She would go along with whatever the director wanted if he gave them as nice a living space as he had and asked them to do no more than what they would be doing in the army anyway.

    “You should be equipped with your armor soon,” said the computer, and even Maine and Wyoming, who hadn’t seemed to be paying much attention to the conversation, looked at her.

    “What armor?” asked South.

    “Oh, has he not told you yet?” FILSS sounded coy and apologetic. Connecticut was pretty sure dumb AI weren’t supposed to get so complicated as to purposely sound like they’d said something by accident. “Part of the Freelancer project includes powered armor that is also currently in development in several other projects, although the director has created some additions that are unheard of in the other projects.”        

    “Hold on.” York raised a hand. “That’s like those...those...what do they call ‘em?”

    North said, “The only other project that uses powered armor is the Spartan project. That only started a few months ago.”

    “We only started hearing about it a few months ago, after Reach,” Connecticut said.

    “Yeah.” York got quiet and glanced at Carolina. (Later, Connecticut would learn that they had met on Reach, once, and that a quiet but determined obsession with her had, in a roundabout way, brought him to the project. For now, Reach was just statistics, other pitchfork-wielding colonists she knew very little about. She had stayed silent for the moments of remembrance with her entire country.

    “You are correct,” FILSS said. “Your armor will be a derivation of that produced by the Spartan project. But I’ve said too much. As you said, you should probably leave me now."

    “Is there anything else we ought to know about the project?” Washington said, not impressing Connecticut with his vague question.   

“I do not believe so,” said FILSS. “I will speak to you many times over the course of the coming campaign, I’m sure.”

    “Okay. Thanks,” said Carolina.

    “Oh, it’s not a bother at all. It has been a pleasure speaking with you, Agent Carolina.”

    Carolina gave a quirky, sideways, endearing smile that lifted up one of her eyebrows. Connecticut believed her when she replied, “You too, FILSS.”

* * *

    The group wandered around. They told stories of their backgrounds. York was the loudest about Oregon and his brothers.

    North and South traded commentary on their family. They had been the only children, they had joined the military together.

    Florida was a father, although the way he talked about his children it sounded as though he hadn’t seen them in a long time, and there was something about him that Connecticut disliked. He was from Texas, but had an otherworldly oddness, a slimy sense of wrongness. She planned on staying away from him, but he talked jovially to Wyoming and York.

    It was hard, though, to really want to make friends with someone who kept saying he wanted to hug everyone.

    “We need peace in our team,” said Florida. “We’re the best of the best, and we’re fighting for peace. In between times of peace, we’ll be darn good at war.”

    “I saw you at the spaceport,” Connecticut said to Wash, and he looked up as though he had been contemplating the floor and suddenly jolted away from it.

    “Yeah?” he said.

    “I didn’t think you were part of our group,” she said, and began to wonder whether this had been a good way to attempt to start a conversation.

    “I got there early,” he said. “I didn’t know you and York were part of it either.”

    “Did you know York from before?”

    “No. I just...” He was nervous, but his voice had a tight seriousness that belied his hesitation. “We just met.”    

    York was standing on the other side of the common room, talking to Carolina and South. Connecticut glanced over, feeling the conversation begin to loose steam. She just wanted someone to talk to, and she had liked that he was quiet. She would probably have stood alone if she had arrived early too.     

    She could not phone home to her parents; not from space, and not without the jurisdiction of the director. In that way, the Freelancer project was more like boot camp than summer camp. Without pen or paper she composed a short letter to her parents on her datapad.

     _Dear mom and dad,_

_We have boarded the ship and been given all of our information. There are about twelve of us so far, with more to follow._

    (The name of the ship would be redacted, so she did not bother to write it. The number of soldiers would likely be redacted as well, but she figured she would try and pass it through. The suggestion that more were coming would hint that the group was small. She had told her parents a little about her friends in the UNSC, and they would be reassured that she had found more.)

  
     _Today was restful. There is not a lot to report. I wonder what mom would think of the kitchen (we have a small one!) and what dad would think of the director._

    There would be more time to add more. She signed her name but planned on writing more after she had been here for a few more days. She crawled into bed. The blanket was thin but warm.     

     Outside in the common room, she could hear scraps of conversation. Someone had found  or bought a radio or phone, and and New York was singing along to county music.  Connecticut had not listened to more country than she needed to know that it was not a requirement for her happiness, musically speaking, and did not recognize the song. “She was a city girl lost in a field of rye, now she’s out in a boat on the ocean...” The song was jaunty and sad at the same time. More footsteps, and the door opened. His voice got louder.    

“Hey, it’s your song,” he drawled as Carolina stepped into the room and put her bag down. She shut the door and changed into her pajamas quietly, nudging the door open a crack before she got into bed and pulled the covers over herself. Connecticut appreciated the crack in the door: she liked to hear the others in the common room. It was just York and the twins now, hulking Maine and quiet Baskerville - Washington already gone to bed, and Wyoming and Florida had not been seen for some time. Maybe the had kept talking to the councilor, who was closer to their age.

    New York sang. “S _he’s a cowboy lost in the long steel halls...._ ”

    North Dakota laughed. “York, that’s not ‘Sweet Carolina’.”

    York’s footsteps stopped. “Huh? What is it?”

    (York acquired his nickname effortlessly, although his name was not as much a mouthful as Connecticut. “York”, with its implication of Britishness, did not fit him geographically, but it fit him to have a name that was short and sweet. York attracted nicknames.

    Connecticut, usually, did not.)

    “I don’t know,” said North. “But it isn’t Sweet Carolina.”

    “I thought it sounded like it might be called that.”

    “Nothing I know,” South Dakota said, as if she was proud of it.

    Connecticut turned over and buried her face in the blanket. It was scratchy, but the fibers settled against her skin. It wouldn’t be hard to pull these sheets flat in the morning.

    The song floated back and forth through her head just beneath her notice as she tried to fall asleep.  



	2. Chapter 2

The morning started slow, with York finding the coffee and Wyoming complaining that there wasn't any tea, and then FILSS appeared on a screen on the wall between the two hallways that lead to the couch.

"Good morning," she said, and Connecticut stood up and she her door. She got dressed in proper military time, while Carolina did the same and yelled, "Good morning, FILSS!" over her freckled shoulder.

They were told they were going to train with paint rounds, and Connecticut's first thought was 'that was quick'.

They dressed in their standard green UNSC uniforms, and stepped out into the hall. Utah, Georgia, and others had their own set of rooms a few hallways away, but Connecticut saw no sign of them. The group was made up of eight people now - Carolina, South, North, York, Wash, Maine, Wyoming, Florida, and South's roommate, a quiet, dark-haired woman called Maryland.

South looked up and down the hall. "Where do we go now?"

(Connecticut liked that everything South said sounded angry, even if it was a good, innocent question. She was a very alive person. Later Connecticut would realize that what she had taken for a general, universe-scale anger was in fact more often petty and rude. South did not think big enough to question their surroundings. For this reason, she was a good soldier. Her ferocity was all out in the open on her skin, very different from the way North showed none except through action.)

South asked where they should go, and FILSS said, "Follow me."

A light flared at the end of the hall, going from an innocuous to a glaring white. The group trooped off toward it.

They followed FILSS's lights down ramps and around corners until they came to a small room. It had windows high on the walls on either side, one large and shuttered and one smaller and open, revealing a small, green-lit observation room above them. The director and the counselor stood inside, their images muddied by a slight tint on the glass and security wire inside it, but Connecticut could already recognize the director's thin frame and squared shoulders and the counselor's slight slouch. Leonard Church was also still wearing his dark glasses.

The whole room gave the disturbing impression of a well down which the director could look at his trapped subjects. The Freelancers filed in.

Rifles, pistols, grenades, and a single long sniper rifle were arranged neatly on the top of the table. North and York muttered and whistled appreciatively.

Connecticut had the brief, horrible thought that this was an elimination round. If the director was trying to replicate the Spartan program, what else could make the Freelancers' lives more difficult than having to fight each other just as they were getting to know each other?

The director's voice boomed. "I trust you have enjoyed your stay so far." He did not pause for an answer. He did indeed trust. "As elite soldiers you will each have a specialty, and your personal reputation will be built around it. You will be used in the capacity for which you are best suited. This test against my staff will help you find what those specialties should be. This is not a live fire exercise."

A sense of tension drained out of the room. People looked around at each other as the director kept speaking.

Freelancer, was, as she kept getting told, an elite program. They were special agents. The director assumed they knew what they were doing.

Here, Connecticut also realized that he knew what he was doing.

This room was set up to make them all think they were going to fight each other.

"So it's to see what we're good at," said South quietly.

Connecticut muttered, "And what we're not."

The director said, "Who would like to go first?"

York stepped forward fast as if he had been leaning that way to begin with. Wyoming swaggered forward slightly behind him, and Connecticut looked at him, sizing him up. He was the biggest one of all, next to Maine, and she didn't know what his specialty was.

Connecticut wasn't sure what her specialty was either. She had been decent with the assault rifle, decent at hand-to-hand, and was untrained on the more specialized weapons. She thought she could use a sniper rifle if she needed to, but was not rated to do so in combat.

(Everything really did come back to high school.)

"I'll go," said Carolina. York and Wyoming looked at her. She simply walked out of the crowd. She was shorter than most of them, sometimes by more than a head, but her red hair was like a beacon.

The director nodded.

"Agent Carolina," said the counselor, and seemed to mark her name on his datapad.

Carolina scooped up a rifle from the table and holstered a pistol and two grenades.

"Be awesome out there," York said.

"Report back what we're up against!" Wash's voice cracked, but Connecticut thought that she should have thought to ask that same thing. Carolina might think of only herself first.

(Later, Connecticut would find that this was far from the truth. Carolina barely cared about herself at all. The fact that this often seemed to manifest as self-loving arrogance made it hard for Connecticut, who valued honesty, to understand her.)

"Good luck," said North.

A door identical to the one the group had come through opened on the opposite side of the room. Carolina looked over her shoulder as she walked through. "I won't need it."

As soon as the door closed, the shutters over the large window opened.

It was like the sun rising.

Connecticut looked up at struts and panels that looked unfinished, but were probably designed to shift into shapes depending on what was useful for a particular type of training. Although nothing could beat the classic of dropping recruits in the middle of a forest, some UNSC training rooms could replicate a variety of environments using holograms and physical construction alone. The room beyond the window was bright and massive, lit by floodlights and paneled in bare metal of varying colors. Tall, square columns rose toward the ceiling.

It was hard to see the bottom half of the room because the window was positioned over head-height, but they all saw when turrets started firing from the far side of the room.

They shot pink globes of paint that splattered against the columns. Carolina dashed back and forth over and around the tops of the columns in a blur of red hair and olive green clothing. Connecticut craned her head and saw the director watching intently, standing in the exact same place where he had been before.

Carolina's gun shot paint too. Connecticut saw pink blobs fly through the air. Maybe there were other turrets nearer to the ground, but no one in the small room could see them.

She thought then that she would have to go into the training room alone.

(So would everyone else, of course, but so would she.)

Carolina took out the turrets, painting them with her own pink bullets. The director said, "The session is complete. Who is next?"

York and Wash both stepped forward. Others took a few steps or twitched. Wyoming and Florida moved around to the edge of the group to be closer to the table.

Connecticut would have to look like she was enthusiastic, or else her specialty would be assumed to be 'standing around while everyone else worked.'

(It might be best for her to take two pistols, she thought. Getting to those turrets would be difficult without something with a scope. She would also have to take into account that there wouldn't be extra ammo inside.)

Maryland snuck to the front and went next, and her run was unseen. Florida's was too.

Before he left, Wyoming said, "So which of you chaps are going with me?"

York said, "You're on your own."

When they finished, each Freelancer walked around through a door Connecticut couldn't see and ended up standing in the upper room behind the director and the counselor.

"I wonder what's out there?" Wash said.

South said, "I don't know, but whatever it is, I'm gonna deal with it quick."

During his run, Wash remained invisible for a few tense seconds in which they all wondered out loud where he was, and then he popped out and hit one turret after the other in quick succession.

Like most things in the military, the majority of the time was taken up by waiting.

When South took her turn, North put a hand on her shoulder. "Be careful out there," he said.

"I'll be fine," she said, but bumped his fist with hers as she left the room.

Then it was Connecticut, Wyoming, and North left in the room. (Despite his initial shoving to the front of the crowd, part of Wyoming was at heart a coward. Despite her quiet ways, none of Maryland was.) Faced with these dwindling numbers, Connecticut darted around and slapped her palm down on a pistol when the director called for the next round. North had been laconic about the whole thing except for his exchange with South. Florida hung back with an air of proudly watching them all move toward some bright future.

Connecticut took the pistol and a rifle. It couldn't hurt to stick with the classics.

The side door let her out into a tall, narrow hallway paneled in the same irregular, shining metal as the room beyond.

Connecticut crept into the bigger room. The light around the columns fell hard and white around navy blue shadow, and as she saw the shadows creep over her own armor she saw other figures move around in the light on the other side of the forest of columns. A white-armored figure helmeted with a thin plastic screen, more like a SWAT team member than a Spartan, dodged between the columns. Connecticut raised her rifle. So this is what had been occupying the others. The director had sent challengers out into the field.

There was also a computer terminal on the far left side of the room, farthest from the hall she had come in by. Over there was probably also where the stairway stood that connected the combat arena to the viewing area above. The room could probably be rearranged in many different patterns, with only that room saying in the same place, secured firmly to the ship.

She glanced at the computer terminal, wondering what it controlled, but had to focus on her assailants first.

They weren't incredibly eager to push forward. They were recycled: one man edged toward her, and she could see the pink spots where paint had already spattered his arms and chest. She took a couple potshots to get the feel of the weapon and immediately regretted it: the heavy, blobby paint bullets fell short of their target and hit the floor, and the gun worked no different than any she had used before. There was no need to get a feel. She was just wasting ammo.

  
Now the bravest soldier was coming forward. Connecticut wasn't sure how many of them there were, but judging from the way the light moved and the glimpses she saw, it looked like three. Not too many, although she would have liked to have some teammates flanking the enemy right about now, or even just standing next to her and watching her back and hogging the spotlight -

And then there were the turrets. One paint bullet grazed her shoulder, knocking her slightly to the left. She took two unbalanced steps on her toes. She hadn't been expecting the bullets to knock so much weight around. A moment later she turned those steps into a frantic backpedal as a flurry of paint bullets shot from the turret. Connecticut skidded to a stop near the computer, and the first soldier charged her.

She stepped forward to keep moving and confuse the turret (maybe she could get under its firing angle - ) and pointed two shots at the trooper. He shrugged both off, but her third got him on the neck just under the chin, and she heard him yell as paint spattered up under his face shield.

He fell, down for the count, unhurt but sitting there to acknowledge his defeat, and the turret resumed its barrage. Connecticut aimed two shots at it and dodged behind a column farther from the computer and closer to where she'd entered the room.

(She remembered that people were watching her, tried quickly to forget that, and then remembered that they couldn't see unless she got on top of one of the columns.

How had York and Carolina even done that?

The director and the counselor could still see her.)

The turret spat paint but now she really had hidden herself from it, and it hit only the other side of the column. Perhaps hidden by the turret targeting him while trying to get to her hiding space, another white-armored soldier darted around to her right.

He was so close that it would just have splattered her too if she shot him. Instead she cracked the butt of the rifle against his collar, grazing his face and hoping that he had been prepared to take that. He seemed to be, since he didn't start yelling about brutality, but he bent over and staggered backward.  
She brought the butt of the rifle down on his head. It was a light strike, just a hint at what she would have done if she were in a real battle.

With a confused yowl, he sat down. "Is that it? Should I sit down for that?"

Someone must have said yes in his earpiece, because he did.

She started to run back toward the computer terminal as the turrets chattered again. A moment later, the third soldier jumped from behind the flurry of bullets, crouching low before standing and swinging at Connecticut's face while raising her rifle with the other hand.

The Freelancer moved, but not quickly enough. The other woman - Connecticut could see her face behind the mask as she looked left, following her deflected punch - caught CT's weapon arm and wrenched at her shoulder, pushing her arm to the side and leaving her front open to attack.

She glanced toward the computer terminal and, without thinking much about it, pulled her pistol with her left hand. She shot the third soldier under the chin as well, prompting a disgruntled scream and a reluctant slide down to the floor. Connecticut jumped over the woman's legs and hunkered down at the terminal even as the second turret started shooting over her shoulder and tracking her. She didn't have much time, the sound getting louder and louder in her ears and she could swear she could feel the rush of air moving over what little was left of her hair, but she scanned the screen.

Along with a sequence of numbers that looked random - ones, zeroes, but also fives and eights - she saw controls for the turrets. They were simple enough, literally just buttons marked on and off. It was ridiculous.

"This is ridiculous," said Connecticut, and pressed 'off'.

The turret stopped, and she ran toward the left-hand doorway.

For a moment, she thought it was locked. Then as soon as her hands touched it the door hissed open and she was through into a smooth, black-green ramp stretching steeply upward. She powered up it, and a few steps in, the door shut behind her.

Connecticut breathed out, looked at the two weapons in her hands, looked at the door, and wondered whether she had done the test right.

No one came to collect her, so she kept walking up the ramp. At the top, the counselor kept looking at his datapad, but addressed her.

"Agent Connecticut," he said, and in a moment of needing simple rules and answers she pressed her heels together and said, "Sir."

"Why did you not destroy the turrets after you had disabled them?"

 _Crap. I knew I did something wrong._ "I didn't need to, sir. They weren't going to do any damage and I could get to my objective without them. If I had been unable to open the door I would have disabled them another way."

"What if your mission had required you to move back through this room?"

She could see the others standing on the other side of the viewing platform, with the whole area visible below them. The Freelancers were standing as still and straight as the director, although Wash and South looked her way when she arrived. Either Wyoming or Florida would be down on the ground now, with the turrets reset and, presumably, the soldiers standing up, wincing from the paint.

She said the only thing she could think of to say, which was the truth. She was too frightened of him to lie. She did not know what he would do if she was found out. It would just make things unnecessarily complicated. "I would have dealt with them when I got back, sir. Probably pushed the button again. Also, it did not. Sir."

His expression didn't change at all. That was strange. It wasn't even a neutral expression, like someone who did not want to reveal his feelings: it was a drugged calm. There was something swampy and dead about his whole demeanor.

She wondered what the director had done to him, and then wondered why she had jumped to that conclusion.

The counselor noted her answer down. He said, "I see."

"Permission to ask a question sir?"

"Go ahead."

"Why did the buttons just say on and off?"

The Director moved over and looked at her.

"Not all of the agents even stopped to look at them," he said, and Connecticut could have sworn he looked at York and Carolina, who were standing next to one another with no trace of their former awkwardness. Either she had imagined the tense history between them or this little battle had burnt the fog off their relationship.

"Thank you sir," she said to the director, and this seemed to be the response he wanted. He nodded.

He said, "You may join the others," and gestured with his left hand toward them. "Leave your weapons on the table."

She wondered what the director had learned about her while she was out there. Probably that she was better with computers than with people. She was drawn to numbers and words and things that would act the same way every time she interacted with them.

The table where the others had put their paint guns was behind the counselor. He looked over it serenely as she set her guns down.

It was with a sense of relief and happiness, though, that she joined the unpredictable group of Freelancers at the window. Down below, Wyoming was under fire near the entrance tunnel from two white-armored soldiers, and keeping them at a distance from behind a column with the sniper rifle while focusing his shots on the one remaining turret.

"Nice job, Connie," North said, looking over his shoulder, and she replied.

"Thanks."

That was the first time her name had been shortened into an affectionate nickname, and later she would remember it less for that first offhand moment than for every other time after. It ingratiated itself to her, that small name, and she thought afterward of the breaking of the other parts of such a long word, Connecticut, as a theft of their dignity.)

(She thought afterward of the syllables as too cute, too easy, like a dog's name or a child's. She poured over maps where her state was tiny, too small for all those letters, and whispered "Ceetee" behind her teeth.)

Wash looked at her and smiled. He wasn't particularly good at it: it looked like it strained him, but it was sincere in his eyes. Wash probably had the same sort of problem that CT had - people always asking whether he was upset or angry. She wondered whether there was something said to life-long antisocial tendencies being linked to just having face muscles that didn't settle into neutrality or happiness well, or whether she should be considering this from the other way around.

"We haven't had breakfast yet," York noticed with just a trace of a whine, and the rest of the waiting period was spent discussing that.

Florida emerged from the training room last, and he saluted the director like Connie had.

"You are dismissed," said Leonard Church, and FILSS directed the Freelancers to the mess for breakfast.

The Freelancers from the other suite were there too. Connie found herself sitting with South, Maryland, and Georgia, with the others from her suite on the other end of the long metal table.

"What happened this morning?" said Georgia, listening to York, North, and Wash talk about the training.

"I'm not sure we're supposed to tell you," said Maryland, waving a fork, and South scoffed.

"Maybe," she said.

Connie looked around the room as if the director would be there to answer the question. He was not. "I don't know..."

Maryland put her hands flat on the table. "We're all in this together. There were three soldiers with rifles, and two turrets mounted on the ceiling, and we had to take them down with guns loaded with paint."

Georgia looked frightened.

"What do you think you learned?" York yelled from the other end of the table.

"Some soldiers can't hit," South said.

"What about you Connie?" York said.

When the word 'Connie' came from York, she really started thinking of it as hers. That meant that everyone else would pick it up too. She was right about that: it stuck.

"Did any of you look at the computer?" She looked at Wash. He seemed the most likely.

"I couldn't press the button," Wash said. "I saw it, but I kept getting shot at. I saw the button, but it was easier to get to the turrets."

"Easier?" York exclaimed. "If you have freakishly quick and accurate aim, maybe."

Wash settled into his seat and sat a little straighter. "I'll take that as a compliment."

"Wyoming was good with the sniper rifle," North said.

"So were you," replied South, adding a defensive "What?" when Connie looked at her.

They ate cereal and meat patties. The quality of food over the next few months would vary widely, from weeks of tasteless MREs to the rare and precious appearance of fresh fruit.

The second group of Freelancers went for their first session in the arena after the meal was over. Connie's group was taken to a classroom by a quiet, masked trooper who called them by their code names. The director and the counselor weren't there, and Connie assumed that instead they were observing the other group like they had observed hers. Her group was lead to a large classroom.

There, they met Alpha.

The classroom was far larger than was required for the eight of them. The many screens at the front of the room were dark. Connie had the sense that they, like the shutters in the small mustering room, could unfold to reveal a new vista of unknown size behind them.

The Freelancers all sat down in the second and third rows, waiting for an officer. Connie sat between South and Carolina, still more comfortable with them than with anyone else since she had talked to them (and York) the most. She looked slightly down at the back of Wash's head. The seats were canted like in a movie theater. Wash's brown hair was spiky from the front but cropped short and straight in the back, and she found herself staring at the skin between his hairline and the raised square of skin over his standard FIF marker. She remembered that he had been standing separate from the rest of them at the spaceport.

FILSS's symbol appeared on the middle screen, and a hologram walked out of it. He wore armor like a Spartan, with a reflective visor and a doglike snout. He marched across the front of the room, shedding patches of silvery-blue light. The Freelancers looked at each other, then back at Alpha. Connie had never seen a smart AI before, and Alpha's almost life-sized hologram drew her attention away from the unsuspecting Wash.

"Listen up, rookies," said Alpha, and all of Connie's impressions of AI as distant and cerebral were dissolved.

Alpha said, "So, the director told me to give you people the grand tour about missions, tech, whatever. All this stuff." He gestured with an air of extreme disinterest, and the desks in front of the Freelancers lit up, revealing themselves to be screens too, and showed rotating images of armor like his.

"We're going to get this?" York said.

"Yeah."

South said, "I thought it was only for Spartans."

"Well," Alpha said, "the director got some."

He talked them through the dangers of using the armor and how the heads-up display functioned. Connie was fascinated. It felt like Christmas morning, but she had never thought she'd be able to unwrap this much technology. Armor like this would let them fight harder, lift more, and just generally stay alive longer.

It was also incredibly impressive. Her friends back in the army would be so jealous...

Sooner than she expected, the instructions were over. Alpha didn't seem to want them in his sight anymore. "Okay. Done. Get out of here." He nodded toward the door. York and North laughed, and Connie stood up as the others around her did. Carolina was looking fiercely at Alpha: she seemed to disapprove of either his blase attitude or the armor. Connie bet it was the former.

Connie was standing at the top of the ramp almost ready to go out the door when Wyoming hesitated at the bottom and called out to Alpha, who was still standing near the front of the room like a human teacher fidgeting after class. Wyoming said, "Hullo mate."

Alpha looked up as if in surprise. "Yeah, what's up," he said, without inflection.

"I wanted to introduce myself. I was just being polite."

"Yeah, well. Good for you."

"Aren't you supposed to be an administrative AI?" South asked from a few rows up.

"I dunno what I'm supposed to be," he said first, angrily, and later -

Later, well, it was just all too obvious.


	3. Chapter 3

The rest of the day was taken up with running, weight training, practice combat, and the assignation of numbers and security passwords to go with their code names. Connecticut became Foxtrot-Five. She received new dog tags with that name and the Freelancer symbol stamped into the metal. For a moment she weighed them against her UNSC assigned ones, noting that her real name wasn't even on the Freelancer version, and for a few days kept both around her neck until it became a bother, and she stashed the UNSC originals at the bottom of her empty duffel bag.  
When they were released back to the common room they got ready for bed. Carolina changed in the bathroom and returned just as Connie was adding to her letter to her parents, unable to make her sentences longer than a few words, and struck with the fact that she still wrote like she was a child. _I've made some friends. We're learning a lot._

There was no use telling her parents that she had seen a smart AI. The censors would just laugh at her attempt.

When Carolina came back, Connie asked, "What did you think of the exercise this morning? What did you do?"

Carolina didn't respond to her, instead climbing under her covers and staring up at the ceiling. Connie sat down on her own bed, wondering if the other woman had even heard her. The armor they would be receiving was still the first thing on her mind.

"What did you do?" she tried again.

Carolina started the longest speech Connie had heard her make thus far. She spoke with a detached air of looking somewhere else, narrating someone else's achievements, and disdaining them slightly - perhaps, Connie would think if she was not in fact talking about herself, she was jealous of them. Carolina did not ever think her achievements were good enough to call her own. (Maybe she did not think she was good enough to belong to her achievements either, but Connie did not see that until Carolina was sleeping, eating, and breathing her place on the scoreboard and Connie was thankfully, blessedly outside the conflict.)

Carolina said, "As soon as I came out there were those three soldiers. I'm sure you saw them."

"Yeah."

"I backed up, I got away from them. I hit two, and another came around toward the back of the room, but the turrets started. I kept jumping in between columns. The turrets were the worst."

Connie could hear her lip curl although the light had gone out. "Yeah," she said, because that had been true. The turrets were the worst.

"You made it, though," said Connie.

"I didn't make it fast enough."

"It wasn't a test of speed."

"It was a test of everything."

Connie couldn't argue with that.

She repeated, "What do you think you got?"

"I don't know."

"No guesses?" Connie turned over to face the other woman.

Carolina was still staring up at the ceiling. "I don't know."

"Did you see the computer?"

"Yes. It would have taken too long."

"There were two buttons!"

"I was busy." She finally showed some emotion in her voice, regret, like Connie's ribbing was getting at her.

"That's okay," said Connie, suddenly feeling a little bad about it. But Carolina didn't respond either way.

She thought of telling her own version, but Carolina was silent and contemplative as the minutes silently wore on.

(Later, York would tell the story differently.

"She was amazing. She flew on top of a column, spun around, hit one guy so hard he knocked into the next one and then she hit that one too. The way she moved like - "

And then he didn't tell it at all, silenced and awed, the opposite of Carolina's own wordy dispassion.)

Connie lay in bed and rewound her fight in her head, wondering what she had forgotten and whether the director or the other Freelancers had judged differently than she had. She would be fine with being trained in some aspect of computer warfare, although she also didn't want to be sitting behind a desk if she could go out and fight. Hefting both the rifle and the pistol had been pretty cool, she thought. Someone must have thought that was cool.

Maybe Wash had thought that was cool.

He had seemed to do the challenge well enough without needing the computer either. The simplicity of the buttons had been laughable. How much could the director really learn from that?

These thoughts swirled around in her head, mixing and discussing themselves, while she fell asleep.

* * *

The next morning, they got up earlier. One day of getting to sleep had been suspicious enough. The next time, when FILSS spoke up, everyone was already dressed and ready. Wash and South sat on the couch, and Connie sat between them while Carolina stood with her arms crossed, her back so straight that she looked rigid. York and North bantered and played rock-paper-scissors for unknowable prizes, probably bits of breakfast. Wyoming was missing. (Later, she would figure out that he was making friends with the white-armored soldiers. He saw them as backup, for when the Freelancers eventually discovered what he was like and turned on him.)

They waited a long time. "I bet the others are going first," South said, and scoffed at them.

Connie didn't think they needed to form a rivalry with the other group yet. "I thought we were going to be spending more time with them."

"I guess not," South replied.

"Maybe we will later," North said, his hands now on the back of the couch near South's shoulders.

They waited. Wash asked whether they thought they would have fruit at breakfast. North and York resumed their game, quietly. Carolina learned forward with her elbows in her lap and interlaced her fingers, every line of her facing forward. Maine stood on the side of the room with his arms crossed, and Connie looked at the thick veins on his forearms. Maine had almost been silent. Connie wondered how he and Wash were getting along.

When they were finally collected, it was the counselor himself who arrived and brought them to the place where they would receive their armor. He brushed off questions, and Connie felt like he was hiding his personality behind a sheet of glass, if he even had one. He was untouchable in a way that suggested he was damaged. What kind of rank was 'counselor' anyway?

Rank didn't seem to matter to the Freelancers.

The armor was housed in a lab, tended by people in white coats. The Freelancers walked single file down the narrow halls. When they entered the lab, they crowded into a side passage and watched as a machine fitted Georgia, his body already dressed in a black under-suit textured with rivets and stripes, with forest green sheets and plates of metal.

"The robot arms are calibrated to make the initial fit," a tech muttered to Wyoming. Connie glanced sideways at them. The older Freelancer must really have been making friends. Why did he feel more comfortable with the director's staff than with his fellow trainees?

The tech continued, "The armor comes on and off more easily than it looks, as long as you do it in the right order."

Alpha had taught them that - how the armor's gauntlets were strong enough to lift the rest, although human arms and hands by themselves would not be able to remove the smaller pieces. They had to be taken off in order, but it was possible to do so on the battlefield for emergency medical crises.

Ideally, though, the armor would prevent any emergency medical crises from occurring.

The group was quickly shuffled to different parts of the large lab to pair up with the machines that fit the armor. Connie found herself looking at a young female tech, who handed her a folded black undersuit.

"Connecticut?"

"Yes."

The tech dumped the suit into Connie's hands. It was astoundingly heavy and cold, more like thick rubber than cloth.

"Put this on."

She did, shedding clothes with hasty hands. The air was cold and the suit, when she unfolded it, was deceptively complicated. With the tech's help, she fit it on and made sure to remember the bits she would have trouble with later. Already the suits were unexpectedly intrusive. "It's designed to be worn for long periods of time if need be," said the tech, and Connie thought about the ways the UNSC augmented even its non-Spartan personnel.

"Your FIF beacons will be modified later," said the tech, "and the femoral IVs that you got in boot and they told you were for medical are designed specifically with this in mind."

"Somehow," Connie said, "That's reassuring."

"Really?" the tech said, pulling at the material at the back of Connie's neck as she fixed the fit.

"Not particularly."

Her armor was already there, looking at her with small yellow eyes. She saw the others across the room, mostly hidden by silver struts and the backs of their attendant techs, but with the occasional pale plain of skin or a thick colored plate of armor.

"Step here please," said Connie's tech, and she stood on a plate as the armor started to fit around her.

She closed her eyes, feeling like the process had nothing to do with her. The tech flitted around, but mostly watched screens. Connie felt the metal settle heavy over her arms and around her waist.

"It is normal to have some trouble adjusting to the weight at first," the tech said. "You'll get stronger as you work in the armor more."

"Who tried this before us?", said Wash, and Connie opened her eyes. His voice was querulous. He was standing a few rows away, dark gray armor entirely fitted to him, with the helmet still suspended over his head. Next to him, Maryland had been given dark red armor with white accents.

The tech hooded her eyes, and for the first time Connie suspected that her friendliness was either an act or a cover-up for something. "We had it tested."

"By who?"

"Other agents."

"Where are they now?"

"They're in the program. Maybe you'll meet them."

"Georgia and that group?"

When the tech answered, it was transparently obvious that she was relieved that he had given her a safe answer. "Exactly. You'll see them later."

Wash nodded. "Okay."

"Stay still sir," said his tech, and he raised his head to look straight across the room at where York was laughing with his tech and rotating his armored forearm. He wore gold, and Connie thought that it fit his personality. Why had they chosen these colors? Customization was unusual for the UNSC. Uniforms were used both to intimidate the enemy and make the soldiers feel like a team. These colors wouldn't encourage teamwork at all - and the director couldn't possibly have determined which color fit each person from one test against paint bullets.

Connie felt that the brown was right for her, though. It was comfortable. And York's gold fit him too. It would draw people's eyes to him all the time, and that was what he wanted.

Brown would keep people's eyes off her.

And gray?

She wasn't sure.

Wash had a gold stripe too, on top of his head, and gold patches on the outside curve of his thighs. She saw it when he stepped down from the platform on which he had been standing. His forearms had yellow panels too, that brushed at the ones on his legs.

Carolina's armor was bright blue, and her visor was small and thin. For a moment Connie thought that her helmet had separate eyes too, but it did not. Connie took one step once the robot arms disengaged from the body of her armor, and immediately felt off balance. She stretched a hand out to steady herself and found Carolina's forearm. She gripped it for a moment as Carolina lifted her arm and looked at her.  
"Sorry," Connie grumbled.

Carolina didn't reply. She looked straight ahead, as if evaluating the other members of the team coming off of their platforms, but Connie noticed that Carolina wasn't moving very fast either.

The armor was heavy. Taking small steps were like swimming through molasses, and Connie had the bad feeling that if she fell over she'd never, ever get up.

(Besides which the entirety of humanity would laugh at a special agent squirming on the ground like a turtle on its back.) She took tentative steps, more appreciative than she had been in a long time simply that the ground was flat instead of rocky. Everyone was toddling around.

"Don't move around too much," said the tech, and moved back far enough that Connie knew to be sure to take her advice. "Walk straight to the door."

The other Freelancers must have been told the same thing, because Connie's field of view was filled with the tall, blocky shoulders of her fellow agents in armor. Carolina was still behind her somewhere.

"This is awesome!" York said, turning his head very slowly.

"Careful," said a tech.

"Yeah, okay man. What does this toggle?"

"You'll have an overshield and an ammo counter when you equip your weapon." His tech, a young man, scurried along behind him. The armor even made their strides look longer. As Connie got used to the feel of it she walked faster and with more confidence. This really was amazing. The armor creaked and squeaked around her as it became more fitted to her body shape.

"We can change your settings if you need," said the tech nearest Wyoming, and the older Freelancer nodded his head once.

"I am in need of a weapon."

"Ah yeah," said the tech. "We're not authorized to get you into combat yet."

"My good fellow. What is your name?"

"Um, Billy, sir."

"Billy. Thank you very much for your assistance."

(Wyoming would know the names of most of the techs, the medics, and the pilots by the end of the week. The pilots showed signs of disliking him by the end of the next, and Connie had a feeling that 479 had organized that in some way. 479 was good at reading people.)  
Connie eased up next to Wash, who looked down at her and tipped his head. She almost giggled. It was the first of many times in which she saw that people's gestures weren't hidden by the armor: they were almost enhanced, if you knew how to look. The armor was supposed to provide anonymity that would make a soldier appear more threatening to his enemies, but to his squadmates it would just make the sense of camaraderie more thorough. If they could fight beside one another and be loyal to one another without seeing one another, what other reserves of loyalty and friendship would they find when they could look at one another's faces?

Later, she wasn't sure whether it was only when she saw his mask that she started to dislike her own, or whether there was really something off about the flatness of the upper arm pieces, or the heavy angles at the side of her face in contrast with the others' sweeping air vents and the smallness of her eyes. The armor was going to becoming her identity, and she was uncomfortable with it.

"You'll go through some basic exercises outside and then you'll be assigned lockers," said her tech as Connie left her behind. "The armor is yours now. Tax dollars at work. If there's something wrong with it or you have trouble with the suit, bring it back here. Do you understand?"

"That's fine," Connie said over her shoulder. "Thank you."

"Don't rush off too fast. You'll knock over somebody's equipment."

"It's so exciting!" Connie, said, and that was true.

The Freelancers were festive as they moved out of the lab. A wheeled cart shook, glass instruments rattling as someone hit the side of the cart top with their hip. York, Wash, and North laughed with each other. Carolina kept looking down at her suit, examining what it could do.

"Purple," South yowled. "I can't believe I got purple."

She had. Her suit also had green accents where Wash had his yellow ones.

North looked back at her. He had been fitted with a darker purple suit of his own. "What's wrong with purple?"

"I dunno. It's just...what, you've got it too."

"Sure. We match. It's appropriate."

"We haven't dressed alike since the third grade."

"Now that's just untrue." North sounded blase. He kept looking at her, although he had to glance forward so as not to run into Wash and North ahead of him.

Somehow, Wash had jumped ahead, and Connie found herself between Carolina and Florida. His armor was blue and thin. (Later, he would acquire a bandolier, but this was his addition. If the director had authorized it or had any hand in choosing it, Connie did not find out.)

"Our parents made us do it." South gestured widely, the armor not seeming to impede any movement as she spread her arms.

"The director is like our parents now," Carolina added.

North said, "South, you bought the matching pajamas. You don't need to act cool here."

She huffed. Connie could picture her hair blowing out of her eyes. Maybe she was angry that her mode of expressing herself would now be largely unseen. "Well that was straightforward."

North said, quietly, "It's true," and no one disagreed. No one laughed. North could say things like that, especially to South, and people would just accept him.  
(South only would for a little longer. She railed out against authority, and she saw love as an authority so she raged out against that too. Connie would see many instances in which she was fully comfortable with her brother, the two of them sitting together or making jokes with a sense of humor that only they had perfectly together, but she was angry and he, for all his kindness, could be patronizing. He could have been a teacher.

After she saw that he got Theta, and remembered the brief description of the childlike empathy AI, she realized that he could have been a father too.

Pity her job was to try to prevent that from ever happening.

But when Theta and North filled a bubble shield with blood and the bodies of Insurrectionist men, the pity went away.

Sometimes, she wondered what would happen to South.)

In the halls of the Mother of Invention Connie could feel her helmet rub against her short hair. Even if the director allowed her to do whatever she wanted with her hair, it made more sense to keep it short so as to preclude any of it interfering with her helmet. She thought Carolina must be pretty uncomfortable with her ponytail squished in behind her.

Someone, Connie couldn't see who, lead the group to the arena.

It was set up completely differently this time. Even the small viewing room had disappeared; perhaps its wall panels and the table holding the weapons had sank into the floor.

Now, the room was set up like an obstacle course.

Ramps and columns punctuated the large floor space, arranged in a rough but recognizable U shape. She didn't see any troopers or weapons emplacements. The director's voice boomed from the viewing room up above where they had all gathered the day before.

"This exercise will teach you, quickly and efficiently, how to use your armor." A crackling noise sounded, as if he were losing reception or conversing with someone on the side. Connie mentally edited in the counselor, even though she couldn't see into the viewing room from this angle. "Your performance here will not affect your degree of rating for combat or any other skill."

"Other ones are going to rate us for things?" South said in surprise.

North replied, "The last exercise did. Maybe others will too."

Connie exchanged glances with Carolina. With her mask pointed down, she looked fierce and angry. Her body language revealed nothing.

"You will all enter the obstacle course at the sound of the buzzer, and complete it together. It is not a race. There is a finish line."

"Passive-aggressive much?" Connie muttered, and Wash caught her eye and said nothing.

"Buzzer," said the director distractedly, and Connie looked up. South and Maryland laughed, dispersing some of the tension from the room. The director snapped, "Let's go. Why isn't it working?"

"Oh!" It was FILSS's voice that replied, and her startled exclamation coming out of thin air made even Carolina give a low chuckle. "Ready," she shouted. "Buzzer!"

At the front of the group, York took off. He sprinted a few steps, mere seconds, before North followed and caught him, long legs pumping but his shoulders canted in an awkward way that meant he hadn't quite gotten the hang of the armor. He laughed nervously: Connie could hear more details of sound than she was used to, more sighs and scrapes and laughs in the back of throats, through the helmet speakers next to her ears. Footsteps pounded. The speed of the race caught up with CT and she leaned forward and ran, at first looking down and then straight ahead as people stomped and swayed around her, the armor so heavy, all their breaths in her ears. (She would be able to hear them no matter how far away she got, no matter whether she came in first or last or somewhere in between, neck-and-neck with another person or alone.)

She would rather not be alone.

York hit the first obstacle, a sequence of columns like stairs, and jumped. He caught the first step with his hands and hauled himself up on his momentum, his shoulder armor peaking like the shoulders of a tiger. Carolina and Maine followed like the rush of rain after the initial few drops. Maine swung himself up one-handed like a gorilla; Carolina jumped, just straight up from the ground to perhaps five feet in the air and landed on the platform on her feet. She looked at York, said something that Connie heard but paid no attention to. It was some kind of taunt and it wasn't meaningful to her. She hit the first obstacle at almost the same time as South, feeling the other woman crowd at her as they jockeyed for space.

Connie jumped. Her back arced, and for a moment she envisioned herself just slamming against the column and falling backward. Wash was crowding her now too, and she was dimly aware of Maryland and Wyoming behind him.

As soon as her hands hit the top of the column she gripped and pulled up. She felt suddenly light and unbalanced as she pulled herself over the top, touched her knees to the top of the column for just a second, and stood up, all so fast that it dizzied her. The armor had lifted her. It made the whole thing so easy.  
A moment later South's mask popped up beside her at her shoulder, and she realized that she could compete.

Carolina was distant, a blue blur at the end of a balance beam, and Connie crossed the beam without looking down. It was just like basic training. The armor didn't matter there. In front of her Carolina was jumping from column to column, four of them, staggered, leading to a climbing wall where York didn't just scale the wall, but took jumps that looked impossible.

As soon as Connie stepped off the balance beam, Wash tried to push past her. Without thinking much about it she elbowed him, assuming that since her six-inch thick armor was just pushing against his it wouldn't hurt him or even affect him much at all. Having the suit was like wearing an airbag.

He pushed back.

She kept sprinting toward the next block, pushing back, trying to keep him from getting in front of her. If they went much farther, they would have to start fighting to push the other off the ledge. Was that what they were supposed to do? They were a team - they wouldn't be rated according to how well they persevered over each other.

But they weren't being rated at all.

Wash seemed to come to the same conclusion. He stopped shoving, but when Connie looked behind her to see South as the twin cursed, Wash took a leap while he was still a foot from the edge of the column. Arms flailing, he landed seven feet away. South used the opportunity to pass Connie on the left like a car on a highway, blurring by. A second later, Connie launched herself into the air.

Her legs tingled. The jump the suits enabled was really dizzyingly high. It just lasted too long: she again felt disoriented, as if she were about to fall over, and then landed and got the world back. The next few jumps were the same, four people ahead of her now but she couldn't think about them. She just had to ignore the ache that was beginning in her limbs and back and keep going. The climbing wall was made of an orange plasticy material. Of course she couldn't feel it with her hands, but it was slick. She felt the scaly undersides of her gloves catch a grip she would not have expected to have as she made it to the first platform. Wash had simply climbed his way up, fast: she could see his feet disappearing above her.

"Get going!" Wyoming yelled from below.

South had started just jumping from handhold to handhold, and Connie followed. Her palms smacked against the plastic and she pulled herself up hand over hand or jumped depending on what felt right. When she reached the top of the climbing wall she was sweating and feeling a cold, strange, refreshing sheen on her skin as the suit whisked the sweat away. North wasn't as far from her as she had thought. She could see him in the purple armor balking at the next obstacle, which was back down on the ground of the room, one smooth slanted slope of orange plastic away.

North was staring at a setup like a swing-set, with tripod legs and one long metal spine, but this one also had spike-tipped bars hanging vertically and swinging side to side. Padded out slightly with the sort of material used on punching bags, it looked like the spikes could deliver a nasty hit if they struck someone, and they would, at the least, slow anyone down. Beyond it, the next obstacle beckoned. It looked like the last one.

North dashed forward, moving with the slow arc of the spikes, and passed the first two.

Connie noticed that one spike had been ripped from its socket, the metal torn into skeletal strips, and was lying on the floor.

(This, she would assume correctly later, was Maine's work. Maine was faster than he looked, mostly because he tended to quickly break the kneecaps of things that looked fast.)

For a moment she looked back and forth, tracking the swing of the spikes, and wondered whether her HUD could help her in any way. If it could, she didn't know how.

She decided to try to move with the spikes, dodging them as if they were people swinging their fists at her. As soon as she got into the thick of them they blurred again but she could see the pattern. She passed three. Then one brushed against her upper arm and scared her, and she heard a horrible clang as a spike hit someone behind her and knocked them to the ground. Right in front of her was the safe spot presented by the broken spike, and as soon as she stepped into it the world seemed to snap back into focus. She still had to keep going, though, and the next time she ran forward she realized too quickly that the next spike was swinging toward her more quickly than she had expected. It would catch her right in the stomach on the upswing at this rate.  
She sidestepped outside the range of the swing.

For a moment she found herself outside the course entirely, staring at it as Wyoming dashed by, wondering whether she should go back in. There were no walls out here, literally. Because she wasn't in the air any more there was no barrier of a drop, no logs or tires or piles of tracked dirt in the way. She could theoretically break out of the course and run, through what she imagined was woods because in her army training camp it would have been but would actually just return her to the comfortable halls and mess of the Mother of Invention.

Or she could go back to the course and finish it like a proper Freelancer.

As Maryland approached, leaving only Florida lagging behind, she did.

She thought, in the armor, it wouldn't have winded me anyway.

She had to dodge one more spike before reaching the next and last obstacle, and she passed Maryland as she took her first few steps onto it. South was a few steps in front. Carolina had finished and Wash was standing up from a shoulder-roll that had taken him, dramatically and effectively, right to the end of the course.

The last obstacle was simply a textured surface, bumpy and plastic, that they had to climb like a hill. She looked up for turrets - being shot at would certainly make it more difficult - and found none. She ran up it, catching South at the top, and realized that the open space and relatively simple obstacle meant that there was more opportunity for people to compete against each other: she found herself shoving South, who cursed back at her and ran a few feet away to try to prevent Connie from becoming an obstacle. Wyoming was up ahead of them, but despite his bulky body he had short legs and seemed to be flagging. South and Connie glanced at one another. The textured floor, which was punctuated with irregular patches like the bumps on a golf ball, didn't add much difficulty except that she had to, every once in a while, look down. She was still tired but she could have sworn she could feel the armor giving her energy. Maybe she had run farther than she thought.

South slammed into her shoulder, purple and green filling up her vision when she looked to the right, and Connie lowered her forehead as if to head-butt her.

"Quit it!" she yelled.

"What?" South's voice sounded hoarse.

"Just give it up and go around him!"

"I was thinking the same thing, or would have been if you hadn't pushed me," South replied as Wyoming, in between them, spoke up over the helmet radios.

"I don't think your jolly good team work will save you," he drawled sarcastically, and Connie gritted her teeth.

She and South reached the end at about the same time. There was a moment, as their feet hit the floor, when Connie wondered whether it was important whether she sprinted ahead even now. The counselor was standing a few feet away with his hands folded in front of him, the palms together facing up and down as if he was in some informal type of prayer. He had sent the people who had already finished - York, Carolina, Wash, Maine, North - to stand over by a wall at attention. It was difficult to go from the obsession that she had had over the last few minutes with constantly moving forward to a walking pace that was more socially acceptable around a commanding officer. Connie and South jogged up to the counselor together. Florida and Maryland were still unseen somewhere in the course behind them - maybe they had really had trouble with the swinging spikes? - but they jogged over the last obstacle a moment later, Florida slightly ahead of Maryland.

The counselor gestured for them all to join the rest of the group, and they did so energetically.

"That was quite a sprint, wasn't it?" said Florida behind them. He didn't sound out of breath. "I'm happier than a june bug in a forest that we get to practice in spiffy facilities like this."

Connie tipped her head. There was definitely something...wrong with Florida.

South seemed to agree. "What are you talking about?"

"Don't fret, old boy." Wyoming walked up beside Florida and put a big hand on the blue-clad shoulder. "Don't worry about them. Peasants."

"What?" South shouted. "Is this, like, fifth grade?"

She stopped, shoulders hunching, and Connie immediately stepped out of her way. South was ready to fight. North stepped one foot out of line, a hand stretching forward as if to pull his sister backward. Connie backpedaled, not interested in fighting over words. She slipped into line next to Carolina and caught Wash looking at her. She nodded at him while Florida held up his hands.

"Now, little lady, I haven't said anything meant to get your riled up like that. Why don't we sit down and talk about it? Express your feelings. It'll be good for you."

Even Wyoming had had enough. "Come now, chap. We're busy. This is a training exercise."

Connie glanced at the counselor. He was as placid as always, looking down the row like he was counting them, and she couldn't see the director in the viewing room from this far away, if he was even there.

But then the counselor said, "Back into line," in a voice so quiet that Connie thought that maybe no one else had heard it, but when she put her back against the wall they did too.

They waited, fidgeting, and then the director descended from his hidden room and paced back and forth in front of them, the flats of his shoes clicking against the floor.

He said, "Good work, agents," and Connie both let out a sigh of relief and wondered whether he could possibly be talking about her. She had nearly ran out of the course out of fear from the most dangerous, and therefore most important, part of the mission. She had not, like Maine, torn it apart. Why should she be rated as highly as Maine?

She was glad the director couldn't see any expression - the relief, the confusion, or the disbelief - in her eyes.

"Aw yeah we did," said York, and Wash and North laughed, one wide and one thin cascade of sound. Connie realized then that the director couldn't hear what they were saying inside their helmets unless they specifically projected it, because he didn't react. Connie saw the lights on the radio display change color.

York had figured out to disengage from the external speakers, and after a few seconds of reverse-engineering Connie had too.

The director said, "Are you pleased with your armor?"

The proper answer was "Yes sir!" so they shouted it, Carolina extra loud and York sounding drunken and Connie sounding - well, shrill, probably, but also one of the few times that she would ever sound sincere in front of him -and meant it, except perhaps Wyoming, who sounded bored to the point of falling asleep.

And Maryland, quiet, who had come in last and also done good work.

"You will keep your armor in a designated room which FILSS will show you," the director said, and Connie wondered whether the dumb AI was going to be their babysitter for the entirety of their tour.

"Permission to speak, sir," said Carolina into the silence, and the director looked at her for a moment as if he were nearsighted and she was too far away. Connie thought he might take off his glasses or look over the top of them. He did not.

Instead he said, "Go ahead, Agent Carolina."

"Each of us was given armor with different specifications. Is this based on our performance in the first trial?"

"In part," he said slowly. "Another part comes from your service records. Many of you do have armor tailored to your skills or what those skills may become. Explore it. Find out what individual differences you have. If you have any questions, you may talk to me, or you may talk to the techs."

This was enough for Carolina. "Thank you sir."

Connie immediately began exploring her HUD. A few blinks in the right direction would open up menus with bright blue numbers and letters, not too different from an abbreviated computer menu. Her armor had specs that she bet were specific to it. EOD, they said. Explosive Ordinance Disposal. That was why she had ugly eyes.

The director expected her to disarm bombs?

She did have some of the requisite training. She was good at doing things carefully and doing them in order and staying calm under stress, although she had never thought of demolitions as an interesting career path.

What did the others have?

The director asked if they had any other questions.

The chorus answered: "No sir."

"Nice job, York," Connie said carefully over the radio as they filed out. "I didn't know we could talk like that."

"You didn't know we could do that?" He sauntered over to her, gesturing. York always seemed to be moving as much of his body as possible at any given time, but it didn't make him look uncoordinated: exactly the opposite. "Aw, I'm sure you would have picked it up eventually. You're smart."

"I." She wasn't sure how he had gathered that, even if it was true. "Thanks. I wonder why each of us have different types of armor, you know?"

"I dunno, man. Mine's pretty normal." He chuckled.

She did not have an answer to that, but she walked with him toward the locker room. When FILSS went inside she saw that both genders used the same locker room, although they were separated into facing rows of black lockers, and there looked to be space around the back to change. She opened her locker half expecting it to creak. It did not. The nameplate said Connecticut, and she wondered whether the director had known what names he was going to give before he had seen the group of people that would be assigned to them.

"You may keep your armor in these lockers," said FILSS, her voice still disembodied. "I do not recommend taking that technology out of this room. The tech may need to access it in the case of examinations and upgrades. Your undersuits may be taken with you wherever you wish, including...to protect modesty."  
Connie nodded. That made sense. They could change out of the undersuits in the bedrooms - as long as they were careful.

"So no peeking, huh?" York winked at the world at large.

FILSS had enough humanity to sound affronted and slightly flattered. "Why, Agent York. I wouldn't consider such a thing. Besides, people with skin aren't my type."

Carolina laughed but kept her voice tight. "Good, FILSS."

Connie heard Wash mutter, "What? Ew."

Carolina sounded happier when she said, "Thanks, FILSS. You've been very helpful."

The locker next to Connie's was empty. Later, she would think that it looked empty. At first, without hindsight and without prejudice, she was glad that she would only have one neighbor.

While North and York punched one another in the armored stomachs to see how it felt she figured out more of the HUD's root files, sitting on the edge of a bench still in her mask and flipping through menus. North and South chatted, and helped one another with latches. Carolina and York carefully positioned themselves at opposite ends of the room, although neither seemed self-conscious in the least. Connie placed her brown armor inside her locker carefully, staring into the back of the bare metal walls. It had seemed at first that the armor wouldn't even fit in, but it managed. She folded the gauntlets and the backs of the hands over each other like a body at rest. The others bantered behind her, York and North, Florida and Wyoming. Maine spoke for what she thought might be the first time, and she turned around to see him standing with his bulky, round helmet under his arm. Even the thick black suit couldn't hide how muscular he was. He had a face like a biker, bald and small-featured with wrinkles around only the tops of his eyes. He glared naturally and without discrimination.

"Mine is different too," he said. "It sees more."

"What do you mean it sees more?" York asked.

"He's got advanced scanners and stuff," Wash said. "Look at the panels on the side."

Maine nodded.

"Good," Carolina said. "That'll be useful to us."

Maine said, "Yeah," and walked out.

Maryland made to follow him, then hesitated when no one else followed. "I'm going to go back to the common room?" she said.

"Right, right." South made it sound like she was tired of walking, but followed her. North waved at York and Wash. When Wyoming and Florida walked out without at all concerned with the others, both of them bony and skinny in the black suits, Maryland and company used them to cover their own retreat.  
Connie left her mask in her locker and got ready to go.

It was only then that she noticed that Wash was still sitting down, holding his helmet in his hands like a fragile piece of art or a vessel to drink from, and she paused in the doorway because she had wanted to do the same with hers but hadn't gotten up the courage to be so somber.

She sat down next to him on the bench and looked at the padded inside edges of the mask.

She would have liked to say the tech was amazing, but couldn't find the words quite then.

"Why is yours different?" he said, and she stood and got the EOD helmet out of the locker.

"It's for demolitions," she said, sitting back down beside him and turning the mask back and forth. It was heavy, with each turn threatening to fall out of her hands. "I don't know why they gave it to me. But it's for demolishing explosives."

"How do you know all this?"

"I read the specs."

He tipped his head. "Is...is there a manual for that?"

"It's in the root file," she said, and reached inside the mask to toggle the HUD. It was hard to see without being inside. "Here."

He made a noise like he was too polite to get her to do things for him. She put the helmet on and blinked through the menus, then handed it to him. "Look."

"It'll be too small," he said, but took it and set it over his head. It worked well enough. For a moment he stared straight ahead, and she knew that he was reversing what she had done, reading through the spec menus so that he could find them on his own suit. He folded his hands under his chin and she looked at his knuckles.

When he took the mask off and handed it to her she could feel the residual heat from his skin, or maybe from hers.

"Thanks," he said.

"You're welcome. That should help you with yours."

The gray helmet was sitting on the bench next to them. She touched her fingernails on it gingerly, then when he didn't protest flattened her palm against the curve and stroked the yellow stripe like the helmet was a cat. "I like this kind better," she said. "They're more streamlined."

He reached over and got his fingers around the brown nubs at the side of her helmet's cheeks. "This part is kinda weird."

"It's hideous. And it's supposed to prevent people from grabbing it, Wash." She smiled and he retracted his hand, looking a bit shocked. "It's okay."

"Is it really?"

"The whole suit is apparently made to be difficult to grab. Again to help people who are sneaking around defusing bombs, I guess."

"Huh." He rubbed his shoulder as if wondering about the relative grab-ability of his suit.

She felt herself blush. Her whole face lit up with heat, and it hit her then in a surge of dizziness and disappointment that she was falling for him.

(It was intimate, wasn't it, that he had put on her mask? He had seen behind her eyes.)

"Can I try on yours?" she said, figuring now that she'd fallen off this cliff she might as well pretend she'd jumped for a reason. "Does the visor look different."

"It actually has a wider frame of vision than yours," he said. "That doesn't seem to make up for being...unable to grab."

She hooked her hands around the sides of the gray mask and put it on quickly, holding her breath until she could take one stale lungful of air in through her nose and smell the new cloth and the slight sweat-smell that was Wash. The fabric seemed to prickle on the inside edge where her chin brushed against the same place his jaw would rest, and she looked around at what was indeed a wider field of view without touching any of the controls or even blinking to activate the HUD.

She looked at him and he was looking at her.

Luckily he couldn't see her blush behind the mask.

She unlatched the helmet and took it off slowly, then dropped it in his lap. "Thanks."

"No problem," he said, and she felt that he was raising emotional barriers because of her glib response.

They sat there together for a short time, looking at the floor and at the lockers.

When she couldn't think of anything to say, she stood up. She suddenly wanted to run away - to be curled up in her bed, maybe, although it was the middle of the day and she knew from experience that no matter how much she wanted to nap she wouldn't actually do it. Naps just lead to sleeplessness, and now, with these added feelings about Wash, it would probably just lead to worrying about what he thought of her too.

"This tech is pretty amazing," she said, surprised at how calmly the words came out as she turned her back to him, started walking and gave him a wave.

"I'm going back too," he said, and followed her, leaving the mask in his locker.

The walk back to the common room was in halls she had walked before. They still felt new and unfamiliar but the light was unchanging, always bright and clear. However, the hall felt close and dim with him there, and she took care not to brush her hands or shoulders against his.

(Bodies were lesser, without the armor on them.)

(Later she would think that she loved the way he loved things: carefully, but never so gingerly that he gave the impression that either he or the object of his love would break.

She would also think that perhaps she felt in love with him because she fell in love with the program, and he was in love with it also. Therefore it would make sense for her love for Wash to die with her love for the program.

Not all things acted according to sense, but some did.)


	4. Chapter 4

They trained with the armor against simulation soldiers armed with paint and learned how the shields worked and just how far they could jump. After the initial obstacle course they were never again pitted against each other, and began to work as a team. On the battlefield Connie's preference for close combat and short-range weapons paired well with Wash's preference for longer-range shots with the reliable battle rifle. Maine fought ferociously and without strategy. Carolina became more and more comfortable with an acrobatic style, cartwheeling in the air, getting every bit of worth she could get out of her long legs.

Connie found herself sometimes hiding, biding her time, tactically retreating, when she could let heavy-hitters like Carolina or Maine go ahead. She wasn't sure whether it was intelligence or cowardice.

In the evenings she would sit with South and listen to her rail out against whatever had annoyed her that day. Sometimes Maryland would join them, quietly: more often she would spend her time with the other group. People said she had started a relationship with Georgia. York and Carolina had fallen quietly and passionately back into theirs, picking back up where they had left off years ago so quickly that Connie never quite figured out how it had started or finished. Carolina had mysterious parts of her past, blurred patches that she did not so much obscure as avoid talking about.

At night before going to bed they would sometimes talk if they weren't too tired or trepidatious for whatever was going to happen the next morning. Connie told Carolina about her family and the letters she sent to them. (She had sent one packet out, three weeks in. She trusted that FILSS had transmitted it but had not heard anything back. She wondered whether her mother was still painting.) Carolina told Connie about her mother, who was, from what Connie could gather, single and quiet. They did not mention her father and Connie did not want to pry. Prying lead to, if not mistrust, annoyance, and annoyance was a sign that too much attention was being paid you in the first place.

So Connie didn't ask.

She took to eating lunch with Wash, asking about his family too. His, like hers, was nuclear and not particularly exciting. He was an only child. He was quiet but smart. They took walks, to the greenhouse or just in circles around the halls together. He tended to catch her at things, nothing embarrassing but just the small comforts: he would surprise her while she was watching television shows about urban myths, or looking at maps of space and the United States. She did not so much catch him as noticed things about him and brought them up in conversation at unexpected moments. He drank milk more often than anything else when he could get it, or loaded his coffee with it; he was left-handed but liked to throw with his right to get good at it.

York smuggled a case of beer in somehow and they both drank slowly but there wasn't enough for them to find out what kind of drunks they were.

Their relationship began with conversations about the Loch Ness monster, in which she believe, or liked to believe, and he did not.

He had asked her at dinner to tell more about her theories about the creatures lost and giant but hidden and purposeful in the wilds of Earth, and South and York took it lightly, and then Connie and Wash went walking and she started to tell him how a lot of things that people thought were untrue could be true, and things that people thought were true could be false, and we had gone to space now, but if we had landed on the moon in the nineteen seventies why did we never go back?

And Wash sat on the patch of grass in the cramped greenhouse and said, "You think they faked the moon landing?"

Connie picked at the grass. She looked up and said, "Maybe. We don't know."

He said, "Why?"

"Because if we sent people into space in 1970, why did it take us so long to get there again? The United States of America needed the morale boost. Someone had to win the war, so they faked it."

"And then they got into space later?"

"Yeah. I mean, it doesn't really matter now. I mean, space." She gestured around.

"I think it's interesting," he said, and sat back on the grass with his arms propped behind him and looked at the small potted plants.

And she wondered why he, who had expressed no interest in any kind of dissension before, thought so.

She said, "Why?"

He looked around, found none of the plants to be a satisfactory rest for his attention, and looked back at her. "Because it's you telling me," he said.

She didn't know what to say to that. Looked at the ground, looked at him, thought about the space between them. Said thank you.

"And what do you believe in," she said, "that I don't know about."

He scratched at the back of his head. "I don't know."

"Don't you?" She looked at him and in that moment they both knew this was a challenge, that she was daring him to be someone she wanted to be with.

Wash thrived in challenges.

"I believe in...justice, I guess. Being nice to people. In an...organized way."

Justice. At the time she found it blindingly noble, and that that nobility erased any need to make his aspiration more complicated than a desire for justice. (Later, she would hate him for answering like he did. She would think that he had confused justice with a whole host of things: complacency, the easy road out, or even sometimes cruelty.)

"I like that," she said. "I like that it's you telling me."

And they talked, about the plants and their hometowns and the friends they had had in high school, and the friends they had now.

For a few days they kept careful distance between them, like grade school kids at lunch time, hyper-conscious of the space. Neither of them, she thought, was going to start a relationship. It wasn't their way. Maybe she was wrong to think he wanted one at all.

York picked up on it, joked about it. Once he told her that the director was looking for her.

"Make it the counselor if you want me to believe you," she said, one hand on the common room wall and one on her hip. York was sitting on the couch with his hands in his pockets.

"Nah man, the director. Wants to see you in the, you know, super secret meeting room. Down the hall, second on the right." York took his hand out of his right side pocket and draped his arm over the back of the couch. York managed to flirt with the entire universe.

"Second on the left? That's, like, a closet, York."

"Not the super secret special room! It's real secret. Go."

"York."

"Bye Connie."

"York."

"You're going to go. You know you want to."

"To meet with the director."

"Yeah, man. Very important mission stuff."

"Did you lock South in a supply closet again?"

"You heard about that?" He lowered his arm.

Connie crossed hers. "Carolina told me about it."

"Aw, she deserved it."

"That's what Carolina said too."

"Huh." York laughed once and gave a sideways smile.

The second room on the right was a supply closet. She was pretty sure that's what it was. The door was closed. She had never seen it closed before.

"Um, hello?" She tried the button.

With a laborious clicking sound like it was protesting the treatment, the door unlatched and swung open. The room inside was dark, but she thought she remembered shelves and clutter on the floor. She didn't want to step through blind.

A moment later, a person threw themselves out of the darkness. He slammed into her, and she spun for a moment and got her back against the wall just so that she wouldn't end up on the floor with his weight on top of her. She pushed her arm up, elbowing him in the side in the process and taking a look at the snarling face.

It was Wash. "York, you - hey!" he backed up, rubbing his side where she'd hit him. "Sorry, Connie, I..."

"What did York do?" She shouted. She was sure she could hear him laughing from the next room, and just as sure that sound wouldn't carry that far.

"He locked me in here!"

Now it was her turn to rub at her arms, almost still feeling the way he'd knocked the wind out of her. Things had rattled around on the nearest shelf.

He asked, "Are you okay?"

The door was still half-open, letting in a little gray light. "I am. What about you?"

"I'm fine. A bit embarrassed, but..."

She looked around for a crate or something to sit on and, finding none, sat down on the floor. She could almost feel the adrenaline draining. It hurt a little. "He locked you in here?"

After a moment of looking around like he was under fire, Wash slid down to the floor opposite her. "Yeah! I tried to unlock it for a while. I don't know how he did it from the inside. Then I came back here and tried to build something sharp enough to wedge in the crack and pry up the lock instead."

"What did he do to it?"

"Something digital."

"But you could have gotten out." She crossed her arms again.

"Maybe. It could have taken me like hours. Besides, he told me I was supposed to be in here."

"Huh. Me too."

"Really?" He looked toward the door like he was planning his revenge.

"He said the director wanted to talk to me. I didn't believe him."

"But you came here anyway."

"I thought he might be..."

"What?"

She looked at him and glared and he glared back like daring her to say it and she said, "Wash, he's been trying to set us up for about a week."

"Yep."

"Is it working?"

She leaned her back against the uncomfortable door frame, tucked one foot against her opposite leg and stretched the other out toward him, tapping her sneaker against his knee. "I think it is."

"We're going to have to tell York he was right," he mused.

She glanced at the doorway. "We could," she said, "But not right now." She scooted forward and kissed him, his plaintive tone when he asked 'is it working' and that single 'we' echoing in her head, giving her a driving force.

The first kiss was a bit awkward and confused but there were more after that and he started to laugh and nip at her instead of apologizing if they kissed each other's noses or knocked foreheads together.

* * *

They settled into a relationship that was easier than any she had been in before, friendship or otherwise, although it was not without its sense of potential, deceptive thin ice. Wash stayed behind in the locker room, waiting for her. They would sit with one another's helmets in their hands. She told him she thought hers was ugly, and he traced a thumb along the underside of its thick cheek plates like he was checking for dust. "Does that matter much?" he said, and she said, "I don't like it."

He lifted his thumb off the metal and stroked her face in the place where the cheek of the helmet would sit. The pad of his thumb was very warm.

The relationship moved quickly after that, both of them feeling like if they blinked they would miss something. They met in what rooms they could find: his, hers, supply closets, anything without cameras. (She started to note the locations of the cameras. She realized how many there were.)

Sometimes the relationship felt perfect, and sometimes it made her sick to her stomach with fear, and sometimes the one came immediately on the heels of the other.

She thought that she was afraid of love and that Wash frightened her, and this was why she was in love with him. She expected love to be a dark windy road on a rainy night and that it would need to be navigated carefully.

He did too, which was why he approached her hesitantly, leaving her gifts on her bed or bedside table when he could. He would leave food, scraps of paper folded to stand up like ugly animals, handwritten notes, or stones and pieces of metal he had found somewhere. She treasured them, keeping them in a drawer behind her shirts. Sometimes she threw them away when they cluttered up the drawer, but she knew that he wouldn't mind. He never asked about them, and he meant enough to her that throwing away a spent bullet he had given her was not some symbolic gesture about their relationship. It was only an action.

She thought of the symbol anyway.

Although sometimes he was hesitant, sometimes he was fierce. She thought of the way he fought, quick and efficient. She thought of the way he never went easy on her, how she learned to twist and wrestle and think on the battlefield because of him, because of the program, (because of the director) and how Wash had learned those things too along with her. She thought of the way he kissed her sometimes, uncontrolled and biting, and she thought of the way he had worn her mask.

She expected love to be frightening, so it satisfied her only when it met that expectation.

* * *

Their first real mission was also the first time they saw Alpha outside the classroom. The director was talking to him when they walked into a briefing room holding a large table and some of the ship's controls, the windows as wide and brash as the ones in the training arena. The mission was against Insurrectionists, the director said. They had to go down to a planet's surface and capture ordinance they had stolen from the UNSC, he said.

"What kind of ordinance?" Carolina asked.

"The energy core for a MAC canon." The director looked sharply at her from the end of the table. Connie leaned back, folded her arms. The director didn't bother with things like standing at attention.

Wyoming whistled.

"They've got ahold of something that strong?" Wash sounded amazed, but there was probably something behind the question. Whether he knew it or not he was good at gathering information. Wash's question could invite the director to tell them who had provided the MAC, whether it had been someone on the inside of the UNSC, or if faulty ordinance had been planted in order to draw the army's attention to the location of the rebel hideout.

The other thing about a MAC cannon was that it had to be mounted on a large starship. It wasn't unlikely that the Insurrectionists would have one - they were formed from small armies all over human territories - but why wasn't the cannon being kept on it?

The director answered none of the unanswered questions. "They stole it."

He continued. "They're held up on New Xinyag, in a small warehouse complex. You will break into two teams. Washington, South, and Carolina will enter the warehouse and flush the Insurrectionists out, then retrieve the energy core."

"How big is the energy core?" Carolina asked. "What does it look like?"

The director keyed up a holographic blue image of what looked like a large bullet, with vents along its length to let out the energy that would be priming inside. "The core will be heavy but not too heavy for two of you to carry while wearing your armor. The second team will be made up of Connecticut, North, and Maryland. You will act as perimeter guards. and guard Team A when they come out with the core."

"How much resistance are we looking at?" Wash asked.

"The Insurrectionists keep only a skeleton crew in this location," the director said. "There may be a few squads, or less. Your pilot will help you gather intel about the enemy population as you arrive. Are there any other questions?"

North asked, "How far is this warehouse from a population center? Could we potentially have civilians in our way?"

"No. The warehouse is not far from the city limits, but it has been decommissioned for some time. Any encounter with unaffiliated personnel is extremely unlikely, but proceed with caution. Your survival is paramount, but the death of civilians would be...unwarranted."

The rest of the team was silent. Alpha flickered behind the director, the AI now standing by a computer near the windows.

Carolina said, "We're ready, sir."

* * *

They walked into the hangar like a posse riding against a silver sunset. The Pelican that had been outfitted for them was sitting near the force-shielded bay door.

"It's shaped more like a fish than a pelican," said Wash.

"Yeah," said South, "but they didn't think anyone would be intimidated by 'the flounder'."

North looked over at his sister. "Now you be careful out there. Team A is going to draw most of the fire on this mission."

"He picked me because he thought I was right for it," South said. "Don't worry."

"He picked you because you're good with short-range weapons. I'm the sniper, which means I'll need to stay back. I can't keep an eye on you, South."

She turned around mid-stride. "I know. It'll be okay."

As they approached the Pelican the pilot walked down the ramp. Skinny and helmeted, she still managed to swagger. "Is this everybody?" She looked them up and down like they were grade school kids and she was the teacher. "I dunno, I expected the armor to make you...taller."

Carolina stepped out in front of the group. "Pilot Four-Seven-Niner?"

"That's me. Welcome aboard. Barf bags are underneath your seats." She turned and stepped back onto the ramp, proceeding into the Pelican without concern.

Connie took a seat next to Wash, with North and South on the other side. Carolina stalked all the way to the front of the ship. "Who's taking the navigator's spot?" She said to 479 as the pilot took her seat at the alcove in the front of the craft. The navigator sat above her, three steps up into a sconce. Connie saw York glance up there.

"Nobody," said 479. "But if you're rated to fly, take a seat."

"I'm rated," Carolina said with a laugh in her voice, and Connie was actually surprised. Carolina had never mentioned that she had studied that particular speciality.

York sat as close to the cockpit as he could, and Carolina disappeared around the corner and up the stairs to the navigation seat.

The engine started with a rumble, and 479 was quiet, surely relaying the details of her exit to the controllers inside the Mother of Invention. Connie had no idea what she should expect to see outside the ship, which moved along under its own intention without any apparent changes in the Freelancers' daily schedule. They were in slipspace quite often, and jumps were noticeable but had ceased being exciting after the first few days of not usually being either able to see the stars or to ask anyone where they were going. This was not unusual for UNSC ships that were too large to dock on a planet and basically used the entirety of known space as a staging area. If the _Mother of Invention_ ever met up with other ships, the director had not seen a need to involve the Freelancers in those meetings.

The _Mother_ tipped around her as they flew out into space. Connie could only see a sliver of the outside world through the viewport in the front of the ship, but when a planet came into view she craned her neck to see details beyond the brown patches and thick white clouds. Wash put a hand on her knee and tapped on her armor so she would know it. She squeezed his hand.

The descent was rocky and fast and they both ended up gripping their restraint bars instead of each other.

479 yelled, "First group gets off in a minute!", and Carolina started counting down from sixty, quietly, in their helmet speakers.

"What about the second?" Maryland asked.

"Don't worry about that!" said the pilot. "Team A, assemble at the back. This is gonna be fast. No way they aren't going to see us. I think he trusts that there's more of you."

"There's less than six of them?" South sounded disbelieving.

"Eh, you probably count as three each or something."

They came out of the clouds in a brown landscape of catwalks and half-fallen buildings, with dusty, cracked glass windows but also signs that part of the facility was still working: a blue force field here, a guard walking with a gun snugged up to his chest. 479 stopped almost mid-air in a courtyard, angling the engines down to wash the dirty ground with hot air. A few potshots struck the ship and zinged. "Okay, Team A, go!"

Carolina, South, and Wash ran. Wash didn't look back at Connie, and she liked him for that. Nobody needed to be assuming that one of them wouldn't be coming back from their first mission.

That didn't mean that she didn't miss him already. She thought of curling up in her bed with the nub of her wrist propped against her cheek.

When the last armored back disappeared from the ramp of the ship 479 took off even before the back of the ship had closed up again. "The rest of you will be like fifteen feet from here but outside a wall," she said.

"Thank you," said North sincerely. "We were already briefed."

"I know! Look, it's your job to call me when you're done. The second you see them come out of there with the thingie, you ping me. I'll be upstairs." She hooked a thumb in the general direction of space. "If we're lucky, the director was right about this group not having any aircraft."

She lifted over the wall and they could hear more gunshots now, small ordinance like rifles. Maryland hunched in her rust-red armor. Her helmet was the same as North's, with that alert look that Connie envied. Connie thought her own just made her look asleep.

479 put down outside what looked like the wall of a jail with more doors. Stunted trees symbolized the edge of the city that Connie could see crouching quietly in the distance. It was morning, with the sun not yet burning off the morning mist that mingled with the brown fog from the factories. The pilot yelled, "Get out of here!" and Connie followed North. She hopped down a few feet and noticed a strand of trees to the right and a reinforced wall to the left, maybe the remnant of an abandoned factory. North made for the trees and signaled for Connie and Maryland to hide behind the wall. Her shoulder brushed against it as she leaned around its edge and scanned the roof of the factory for snipers or security cameras. North disappeared into the shadows of the trees, the purple working astoundingly well to make him look a dark, natural color. Maybe he would try to climb a tree, but Connie was doubtful that one would hold the weight of his armor. Maryland leaned out beside Connie with a DMR in her hands.

Connie switched her assault rifle for a pistol and sighted along the top of the wall. A few red dots - any person except a Freelancer - meandered along at the top of her HUD, which had been modified for now to pick up heat signals instead of just UNSC FIF beacons.

"It's going to be a lot of waiting," North said quietly.

"I know," Connie replied, still scanning.

Something inside the facility exploded.

"What were you saying?" shouted Maryland over the sound and the quick, staticky change as their noise filters went up.

North said, "Oh nothing," and Connie sighted on the wall again.

Then, they really did wait for a while, settling into their places. The minutes were going slowly, she thought. She looked up what felt like every ten minutes and one more number would have turned over on her HUD, just one single change. Minutes were long here. Connie looked down at the dark brown, rutted dirt. North had entirely disappeared. She wondered what Wash was doing, how Carolina was behaving, how South was mocking both of them.

Whether they were even still alive.

Another explosion lit a few outward-facing windows in violent yellow, and suddenly York and Carolina were pushing a casket-sized object out a tiny door on the bottom of the wall and lifting it from either end, carrying it like it was heavy. More red dots appeared closer to the center of Connie's HUD and she sighted with the pistol again, hearing Maryland shift around behind her.

"We're gonna need help here!" yelled Carolina. "We can't move fast with this thing."

"479, how close can you land to the wall?" North radioed up.

"I presume that's a 'please come back message'," said the pilot, her voice crackling with the distance. "In a minute I'll find out."

Connie saw two people emerge from the windows above her, both of them helmeted and armed. One had a red stripe on his mask: the other, more important at the moment, held a sniper rifle. North shot and nearly hit the first one, who ducked back inside. The sniper recovered quickly and lashed out and dug a furrow of dirt in front of Connie and Maryland. They ducked back behind the wall, rocks clicking against their armor. Connie leaned out again immediately, zoomed in, and shot at the sniper. She may have hit him, because he pulled back, but it wouldn't do her any good to assume.

South and Carolina were hurrying, South grumbling over the radio. Wash backed out behind them, firing steadily, three Insurrectionists getting closer and closer to him.

"I'm moving up," Connie said.

"To where?" Maryland didn't sound happy.

"To give them cover."

"Okay."

"Synch."

"Synch!"

Maryland fired her gun upward just as Connie ducked out of cover, the red Freelancer providing as good a distraction as she could. North was on the move; Connie could tell by the angle of his shots, and she could see him now, on the ground between the trees. One of Wash's pursuers fell. The Pelican was nowhere to be seen, but Connie had no time to call out to 479 and it wouldn't do much good. Instead she ran to Carolina's side and shot toward Wash's pursuers. One moved closer to him and she saw him dispatch the enemy with an elbow to the face.

Carolina glanced toward her. The MAC core was stored in a box with rounded-off sides, marked in lighter black with the name of the company that had made it. Connie shot one of Wash's pursuers with her pistol, catching him on the shoulder and then again as he fell.

The body tented on the ground, one elbow at an awkward angle holding the rest off the ground although it looked like gravity should bear it all to the dirt. It was the first person she had ever killed. She had gone through psych programs for this in the very beginning of training, when they wanted to get the troops used to what they were going to be doing. They had told her that the first death would be hard, but she thought mostly that she still disliked the guy afterward. There was supposed to be respect involved, but the dislike hadn't gone away.

Two sniper shots rang out and she heard Maryland yell, then confirm "I'm fine. I'm fine!"

Carolina yelled, "Get to the ship!"

Connie had barely noticed it in the noise of the battle but the Pelican had arrived, blowing around the leaves on the trees as it came to a vertical stop maybe twelve meters behind her. North emerged from the trees and backed toward it. Wash shot someone else, then flinched as the sniper aimed at him. For a moment, Connie lost sight of Carolina and South. When the dust cleared they were almost at the Pelican and Maryland was stepping out of cover with her pistol raised to help cover them for the last few steps.

Then the space between Wash and the warehouse was clear, and South and Carolina were stepping onto the Pelican. The sniper concentrated on Connie and Maryland as North moved out of cover, then abruptly switched to him.

"Good, good!" Carolina said. "Get going."

Connie backed up. She felt a shot hit her and gasped, but it only took down half of her shield and didn't hurt. The armor would even prevent most bruises. She heard Wash's intake of breath in her ear. Then another sniper shot hit so close that she was sure it had hit her. When she felt no impact she thanked the vague thing that she thought might be God and backed up another step.

Her heel hit something. South cursed. Carolina said, "Let's go,"and Connie stepped back again, felt her heel hit something again, nearly throwing her off balance. North and Wash aligned in front of her. She registered that one of them them had been yelling about Maryland. That was her then, dead behind Connie.

"Cover me," Connie said, and North stepped one step closer to the warehouse, the long sniper rifle dipping toward the ground. A Warthog engine sounded from somewhere, probably around the corner of the factory.

Connie turned around clumsily, feeling with her feet for obstacles she didn't want to see, looked at the rust-red body on the ground, and lifted Maryland up under the arms. She couldn't see a bullet hole, but red blood had splashed the ground. She pulled Maryland onto the lip of the Pelican's ramp, stopped so as not to get in South's way as the other two women were arranging the box in a place in the troop bay where it wouldn't slide around or unbalance the Pelican, and then propped Maryland up against a chair. A pistol dropped from Maryland's hand and Connie picked it up and magnetized it to her left hip, her only empty gear spot, without thinking much about it.

Wash and North clattered in beside her.

"Close the door, close the door!" Carolina was yelling, and just before 479 keyed the controls Connie saw a Warthog careen into view from behind the trees where North had been stationed. A few sparking yellow gunshots pinged off the edge of the closing ramp door.

"Move it, Connie-" That was South, wedging the box into place. Connie forced her numbing legs to step around her.

"Got it?" yelled 479.

"Got it," said Carolina.

"I hope it's not going to irradiate the place."

"So do I."

Connie slumped into a seat and pulled the restraint down, and only really noticed the person sitting beside her when she registered him as Wash, who was looking at her with concern with his helmet still on. She saw Carolina do a headcount, pointing at each of them as if commanding them to sit, and then take a seat herself, with South almost behind the box and North leaning over to make sure she was okay.

And Maryland curled in the corner between the box and the closed ramp, slumped over the restraints. Carolina had counted her too.

Wash squeezed Connie's hand and this time she held on to him.

The Pelican was still taking off, the ascent making the floor steep, but Carolina unhooked and walked across the bay to stand over what Connie knew was Maryland's body. Her icon had disappeared off her HUD but Carolina yelled her name like she was trying to get her to wake up, lifted Maryland's chin up, listened to the clunk as her helmet touched her chest again when she let go. Connie could see two bullet holes in Maryland's chest now.

Connie said, "Hurry up, 479, we've got wounded."

"I'm flying as fast as I can," the pilot said over the mics. "We're lucky they haven't sent anyone after us."

North unstrapped too and glanced at Carolina before taking Maryland's helmet off her. There wasn't need to feel for a pulse with their HUDs working but North did it anyway and shook his head. Connie wondered what Maryland's last words had been and couldn't remember. Something about covering her. Something about the war.


	5. Chapter 5

They could have frozen it or given it a burial at space: Connie never found out what happened to the body. The director said he would keep it. The counselor, the closest thing they had to a chaplain, gave a brief and nondenominational prayer of goodbye, and then techs wheeled the casket away, and the Freelancers were left standing there in their dress uniforms.

Carolina headed back to the common room first, but it wasn't with any sense of completion. "Unacceptable," Connie heard her say as she followed with the others.

York mourned too, in a less internal way than Carolina. He actively moped. Everyone was quiet; York was missing Maryland. They hadn't been close but but he missed her like he would miss any of them. The Freelancers stood around in the common room, not knowing what to do with the free time that had, earlier, felt like a blessing. Connie sat down on the couch and felt it creak as Maine sat beside her and stared at the coffee table.

(That was pretty normal behavior for Maine.)

Connie heard Carolina and York talking near the door to her own room. She could have turned to see who else was with them - from the footsteps it was more - but it didn't really matter.

"It didn't have to happen that way," Carolina was saying, her voice straining like she knew the words didn't really have any meaning. They were too trite to express what she felt, but they were the only ones she could dig up. You found out in war sooner than in school that the cliches became cliches because they were true. "I should have been watching her. Someone should have been covering her. We could have slid the box up the ramp."

"You're making it sound like it was your fault, Carolina. It wasn't." That was York.

Carolina said, "It wasn't anybody's fault."

Connie was glad Carolina wasn't blaming her.

"That doesn't mean I'm happy about it," Carolina said.

"No one expects you to be happy about it..." Connie could hear York circling Carolina, could picture the expression on his face as he tried to comfort her. If they ended up in her room Connie would rather find somewhere else to sleep. Wash's or the couch. Maybe whichever Maine wasn't in.

"I know," Carolina said. "I know exactly what people expect."

York didn't ask her what she meant. He hugged her - Connie could hear the clothes rustling and shushing together, and she turned further away. She stared at the green stitches in the couch as if they were fascinating, as if they were a jungle with infinite kinds of life-forms inside. (Don't look when mommy and daddy are fighting. Find something to do. Read about outer space or the circle of shadowy men who decides the next President of the United States.)

"Hey," said Wash, and sat down next to her. She looked up, startled but unwilling to show it. North and South passed by behind him, talking loudly to one another. They sounded friendly. They didn't sound like they were mourning.

Wash had a folded map with him. He set it on the table, and she looked at the paper with a sort of hunger. She hadn't touched anything with pages in a while.

He looked at her, and the brightness of his blue eyes forced her gaze away from the table. "Are you okay?"

"Yeah. I think I'm just..." she looked down at her hands, folded them in her lap so she could feel the heat of her own skin. "Sad. I'm just sad."

"I didn't know her very well," said Wash.

"I didn't either. I don't know how South is taking it."

"North helps."

Connie thought, and York helps Carolina, and you help me. Wyoming and Florida still hadn't come out into the common room this evening, ever since they weren't sent on the mission. Maybe they had had their own. She had briefly seen the girls from the other rooms huddled together, talking over Maryland in their own way.

She thought, maybe South's glad she has her own room now.

Wash said, "She did good. She helped us get out."

"What happened in there?"

He sighed. "They just had the thing in a box, a crate, like they were going to take it somewhere. There weren't a lot of guards. The sniper and the other one only showed up after we found the door. What about you?"

"We just waited. Then we saw you come out. You did a good job."

"They mostly used me as support. South wasn't as good with her gun." He said this casually, without arrogance. "And Carolina wanted to be the leader. That was fine. She picked up the box first. I was worried..." His voice went higher-pitched. "That it might be irradiated."

"MAC cannons can run on iron cores as well as uranium cores. It might not have been. And our suits might take care of that." She rotated her arm, imagining the armor cuff.

He shook his head, leaned back against the couch, exposing his neck. "I didn't sign up to get irradiated!"

"It's fine." She smiled. "I'm sure the director would have told us about that."

Wash relaxed, looked down."We completed the objective." He said it like he meant 'at least we survived.'

Connie didn't want to have to keep staring at the threads in the couch to calm her thoughts. There had to be something else she could think about here, something she could grab on to. The mission. The objective. She thought out loud, growing more and more comfortable with telling Wash whatever was on her mind. (Later she would not so much regret this as remember it like the half-forgotten words to a song. The beginning was there but the rest of the feeling just trailed off.) "So we've got a MAC cannon for the ship now. What are we going to use it for? Does he expect us to be fighting capital ships?"

"Maybe he does. The Insurrection has been getting strong."

It helped her to try to figure things out instead of dwelling on Maryland's death, so she unknotted her hands and gripped his forearm to show him that. "Why would the Insurrection be working at a facility that produces MAC cores?"

"I thought they weren't. They were just guarding it. The facility was abandoned."

"Oh. Right. That makes sense. He should have been clearer. You said it was in a crate."

Wash did not disagree.

Connie already looked back on her statement about the director giving them all of the information and re-examined it, wondering if she had enough proof to back it up. He hadn't told them much about the mission.

Maybe Wash saw the wheels turning in her head. He looked at her like he was examining the exact changes in her face when she was angry. (She knew them: furrowed brow, but the skin didn't get wrinkled there: she got furrows on her cheeks too, like an old woman, when she was angry, and she hated them.) He said, "I know you're angry about her."

Her was Maryland, of course. Connie said, "Aren't you?"

He paused for a moment, "What do you need?"

She tipped over to lean her forehead against his shoulder. The gray t-shirt was thick and soft but she could feel that his arms were muscular underneath it, and not particularly comfortable. "I just need to be alive for a while."

He shifted around uncomfortably and she sat up. He took ahold of the map and unfolded it on the table while she propped her chin on her hands.

She asked, "Where'd you get that?"

"It was North's," he said. "He said he used to take it on road trips and he'd always carry it around."

"So why do you have it?"

"He said I could bring it out here. We thought it might be nice to, you know, look at our states. And look at her."

The map was yellowed slightly, the colors pastel red, blue, oranges and yellows and siennas with a tiny key in the bottom corner. Town names in black, different kinds of roads in different widths of line. Connie liked how organized and simple maps were. They marked things that were - or that people thought were - permanent.

He moved his fingertip across Maryland, picking out towns. Columbia, Silver Spring. Connie noticed one called Burnie and took a second look. Glen Burnie. Wash's thumb in the sepia Atlantic.

And D.C., she noticed, snugged against the bottom of Maryland. Wash ignored his name.

"Alive, Wash. I said be alive." She took his hand and moved it north, pressed it down across the colored mess of lines and counties that was Connecticut, then picked his hand up and with some cooperation pressed it to her cheek. When she let go he stayed there, looking into her eyes with his head tipped, and then pressed his lips together.

"Sorry," he said.

It wasn't something he said often. If it had been, she would have heard it a lot over the next few weeks. She would have heard it so many times that she would have started to hate it, using one small quirk to mean everything about him that she was trying to get herself to leave.

But he didn't say it often. He did not regret or internalize his actions. He simply did them, and there was not a lot there to be sorry for.

"It's okay," she said, and smiled, and he shifted his palm to cup her cheek more comfortably (covering, caressing the wrinkles she hated).

She never found out where York and Carolina ended up. She went to Wash's room with him and just curled up there, Maine snoring quietly in the next bunk over. Both Connie and Wash in t-shirts and sweatpants they figured out how to make the small blanket cover both of them, just barely, his knees pressed up against and angled around hers, her wondering whether her weight bothered him or her breath smelled or her breathing was too loud, and at least she wasn't worrying about Maryland maybe floating out in space somewhere. She grabbed the collar of Wash's shirt and he snugged his arms around her shoulders, pressing his face against the pillow above her head so that his chin touched her forehead, not squished or compacted against her but just laying there, his hair falling flat and spiky over his forehead, comfortable, just being himself, like Connie wasn't there.

* * *

The next evening North and York strung a white blanket up (who knows where they got it; it wasn't one of theirs) and used someone's hand-held game system (North and York had both brought theirs to play the latest Sergeant Mayhem expansion pack) and they watched an old movie with talking animals.

All of them curled up in blue blankets stolen off their own beds, the movie screen rippling as someone's shoulder hit the bottom, and Connie pressed the bottom of her chin into her prickly blanket and looked at Wash. He was posed a lot like her, his face in his arms against the floor, and his eyes shut. When he opened one the blue was all gone, washed away in the darkness of the room, with brighter colors from the movie moving across his cheek.

He looked at her and she smiled because he made her feel like every moment in her life was a moment to look forward to, and she crept forward under her blanket. He put a blanket-wrapped arm over her shoulders and she tucked her knees under her stomach and turtled next to him, pressed against the unexpected softness of his side. Across the room, North and South resettled with their backs against one another. The older Freelancers had gone to bed hours ago. That left Maine as a mountainous lump in the middle of the room, one tree-truck leg stretched out under the card table, and York and Carolina already tangled together closest to the door.

"I love you," Wash whispered in her ear, and Connie turned to press her cheek against his in an instinct for warmth. The heat spread to her stomach and settled naturally there like a new season.

Then she felt the fear start sickening that season. The enormity of the meaning of what he had said dizzied her, and tears welled and pooled in her eyes before she could stop them. Involuntary, they seemed completely disconnected from the rest of her feelings. Wash noticed this tectonic change and looked at her with concern, his eyes momentarily tracking the tears. Instead of ignoring them or chasing them like prey he kept instead looking at her, not at the product of her rush of emotion, and she loved him for that.

He pushed one foot against hers. She hadn't thought before now that he was wearing socks, but she could feel the fabric under the blanket. His toes curled around the side of her foot and she lowered shoulders that she had subconsciously hunched. He was still looking at her, so innocent that she did not know how he had captured her so easily -

But love was not captivity, was not surveillance, and his grip loosened as he waited, and his eyes looked gray.

She kissed him on the cheek and burrowed her head against his blanket.

"I love you too," Connie said, and wondered what she meant.

No thunder clapped. Someone shifted in the darkness. Wash nodded against hers, and she could feel his smile.

The scoreboard went up the next morning.


	6. Chapter 6

They found the leaderboard at breakfast, names already arranged in order. Connie dreaded the fact that they had been ranked according to a system they did not know, but the dread of the board itself took some time to develop. At first she squinted at the names with the rest, and at the symbols next to them.

"What's that mean?" South asked.

"Mine's a gun," Wash said. "Sharpshooter?"

"I don't know what this thing is."

"It's numbered," North noted. "Do we get points?"

And York, always belittling things, always naturally finding some way for them not to hurt him because he never really took them in at all: "It's like a video game."

(Later, she would think of York differently. He was not shallow. He was simply different from her, processed things differently. And he-

But she - )

The board looked like this:

Carolina  
York  
Maine  
North Dakota  
Washington  
South Dakota  
Wyoming  
Florida

No Connecticut. No Connie. She looked at it a second time, squinting, as if that would change the names, and then she settled again, hackles lowered if she had had them. Maybe these names were just placeholders. Maybe the games hadn't started yet. She would do better. Besides, it didn't even matter. They were in a war. What was the point of an internal conflict? (Competition bred success. She knew this. But to see it writ so large scared her.)

They went back to their tables and speared the food with plastic forks and talked about it, North and York and Wash nodding at each other's statements like bobble heads, like disagreement was impossible.

"I'm sure it's to promote learning new skill sets, or something," said North, waving his fork, and Wash looked at him.

"What do the symbols mean?" He wouldn't drop that question.

"Our specialities. They must have picked them between now and our first day, man." That was York.

"The numbers could be generated from kills or shots fired," said Wash.

"In combat or in training?" North asked.

"Both."

Connie saw the few moments in while Carolina was pleased with herself. Later she would wonder why there weren't more of them. York would try to explain to her that Carolina was hard on herself, that nothing would ever be enough, but Connie could not understand what it was to be on the top of the board (to be on the board at all) so she could not see from a perspective where having that spot was meaningless, or did not mean enough. At the breakfast table she saw Carolina smile softly, fiercely because she had ferocity in her but also kindly as if she were seeing a long-absent family member whom she loved. Then Carolina moved closer to York, almost possessive, and then she went back to normal, frowning, uglying her face a little.

At the breakfast table, for a little while, Connie forgot about the board. The names were just names and all things were possible. She had a long life in front of her.

When they next saw the director it was for another training bout, one suite against another. They had not seen one another for a while, like their schedules were kept purposefully different. Connie noticed that a few people were missing: tall, white-armored Utah, just gone. Scheduled out, rotated out, or dead.

Connie wondered if the director would tell them.

"What happened to Utah?" she asked Georgia, all of them standing together in front of the director in the viewing room, and the green-armored man said,

"Equipment malfunction."

"What kind of equipment?"

"His special enhancement. We've each gotten one. I bet you're getting them next."

"And Utah's...what? Sent him to medical? Sent him home."

"He died, Connie. They won't tell us how." Georgia looked up. Rolled a green coin, an old copper penny that looked tiny in his thickly gloved hands, between his fingers. He slipped it into a side pocket, the little depression that usually held the tiny hook to secure a grenade.

Died, she thought, and it tolled around inside her like a bell. The sound Dopplered away.

She said, "That's, that's terrible."

"Yeah, man." He patted the pocket with the coin. "Yeah it is."

They didn't say anything else about it.

The director lined the Freelancers from Connie's suite up in the viewing room, with Georgia's group standing in a loose cluster to the side like the kids still waiting to be picked for a team. The counselor handed them things: big boxy things as unlike a Spartan's augmentations as they could possibly be. These were external and awkward.

"It hooks onto the back of your suit," Carolina said. Of course she had figured it out. Down the line the Freelancers attached the augmentations, first turning them over in their hands, looking at the glowing auxiliary colors of the black boxes or spheres. Connie's had a symbol on it, two people running. She supposed they all had symbols.

She wondered whether it was the same symbol as was next to their name on the board and realized that until she asked someone, Wash probably, about it she wouldn't be able to tell. "Is yours..." She leaned over to ask Florida, the closest one and perhaps the shortest man there, the one she had to crane least to talk to.

Then she straightened up as the counselor spoke again. "Techs will be present to help you make your special ability work," the counselor said.

Connie turned hers over in her hands again, reluctant to put it on until she knew what it did.

The director said, "Agent Connecticut," and she actually jumped.

She tucked the ability pack under her arm and stood straight, meeting his eyes. "Sir."

"You will be first. Report to the training room floor."

First, Connie thought. Why? Are we going in reverse order?

She did not ask him. Later, she would have. Now, she had more to lose. She wanted his approval: he was, after all, in charge, and he had done nothing but be kind to them. She felt that responding well to his tasks was her responsibility, and that, in part, was why she was so disappointed that she was not on the board. She had failed him before she had begun.

But maybe she could make it right if she performed well with her special ability, whatever it was.

The desire to please the director and the desire to investigate him like a criminal warred with each other in her. This lead to the latter actually occurring, later, and she wondered how important the former had ever been.

As it was, she stepped forward.

She reached back, found the magnet and the hook low between her shoulder blades, and slotted the augmentation in. The symbol of the two people running appeared in the lower right corner of her vision, almost touching her FIF radar. Nothing hurt, nothing changed, and she realized she had been tense.

What had happened to Utah?

The councilor moved forward and circled her, and she stood still while he very obviously looked at the attachment on her back.

"You got the hologram," he said, sounding slightly surprised as if he hadn't been able to tell what augmentation each person got until it was strapped to their back. Maybe that was true. She didn't know what rules governed these things.

He said, "You will be able to make one hologram of yourself. It is useful for...keeping enemies off you. They will be...unaware of your position." He had that odd, halting vocal quirk, not suggestive but dreamy and dreary.

"You will be competing against..." He looked down as if consulting an invisible datapad. He had none. "Agent Maine."

Connie cast back to the last time she saw the board and thought that Maine had been near the middle, maybe closer to the top. He was big and quiet and kind and Wash's roommate, and he hadn't volunteered much else. He joined the others in the common room but he didn't speak much. His presence was not awkward but nor did it change anything.

And he was strong.

She was a little bit scared of him.

Maine stepped out of line. His armor creaked, the overhead lights reflecting off the round, gold armor with its flat bug eyes. The counselor walked around him too. Connie saw Carolina and Wash behind him as she watched him circle.

"Agent Maine," said the counselor. "Your augmentation is invisibility. This effect is temporary."

So he would be invisible and she would be doubled.

She would be fighting herself, at times.

She would be the only one who couldn't hide, the most obvious, the one who stood out even though he was the one who was over six feet high and massive.

She didn't like the sound of that, or the feeling.

Always with being watched.

"Normally," said the counselor, "you will not be running your augmentations without an AI's supervision. You must call back to the ship to use it. Alpha must be...aware if you are using it. Otherwise, the power will all be routed to your suit. It will fail. It will hurt you."

The counselor didn't usually speak for this long. The effect was hypnotic. If she had been in a classroom instead of an army she would have started staring out the window, wishing she were in the lawn.

York disrupted the miasma. "Permission to speak?"

The counselor said, "Go ahead, Agent York." The director nodded at the same time, just giving his permission.

"I thought AI could only liaise with capitol ships, things like that. Big things. Bigger than Maine." He laughed a little. He was talking in circles, trying to be funny. He thought he was doing well. Everyone else was silent.

The director spoke, and every eye turned to him. He still stood with his hands behind his back, shuttered light falling in green stripes across his black clothes. "That is usually the case. However, we have put measures in place to allow for unusual usage." There were no pauses in his speech. The director was sure of himself.

Connie picked at the words but knew that she didn't know enough about AI to contest them. He was probably right. Besides, she couldn't change what she could not see. She could only work with what was present - the board, the other people in her group, herself. Anything else...it was like trying to change the government.

It was impossible.

It wasn't impossible to go around it though, to reach to the people who pulled the original things, to find the things the government didn't want you to find.

It was impossible to change what was right in front of you. Connie and Wash had this belief in common.

Unlike Wash, Connie liked to sidestep it.

The direst said, "You will be issued with paint guns." He sounded demanding. "The first person to hit the other three times will be the winner. You will see the techs for the rest. Go now."

Connie and Maine exchanged glances, then walked together to the side of the room and down the angular hallways into the arena. The Freelancers almost always used these passages, not the larger one on the deck below, so that the people above could see what was going on. She liked transparency, but had a feeling that pitting Freelancers against one another would cause more drama than anything else.

A tech was waiting at the bottom of the ramp, just like she had expected. The young woman handed both of them assault rifles, the snub-nosed version instead of the more flexible DMR, and moved around to both Connie's and Maine's augmentations, checking, wiggling them in.

"Do you have any questions?" she asked. She could have only sounded more bored if she were chewing gum. She looked Maine up and down, but met Connie's gaze evenly.

"How'd you start working here?" Connie asked.

The woman said, "My sister. Get out there," and patted her on the shoulder.

Connie said, "No secondary weapons?" and leaned the long body of her gun against her armored forearm so she could hold up her other hand, empty where a pistol would fit.

The tech said, "Not for this exercise."

So it was just part of the variables. Connie kept walking.

Maine put a hand on her shoulder as they walked down the last, short portion of the aisle, just a second-long, brotherly gesture like between two men. "Good luck."

She nodded. "You too."

Then he walked to the other side of the arena.

She stood where she was, rewrapping her fingers around the trigger and shifting her weight from foot to foot. What would she get if she won this? Maybe her name would move up a space. Maybe it would move into view. That would be nice.

(It was a goal to look forward to, like a cool shower after a long jog on a hot day.)

She waited for just a few seconds until the buzzer went off, a proper one this time, loud and ear-assaulting instead of FILSS's friendly tones. The arena was dotted with columns again and she moved to stand behind one, wondering whether if she could jump on top of one if she tried. They weren't higher than anything she had jumped onto on the obstacle course where she had learned to use her armor.

She couldn't hear Maine, couldn't see anything on her HUD except her lone green dot. Maybe he had gone invisible already. What would the augmentation feel like? She thought she could feel the eyes of the others - Wash, York, Carolina - on her back.

She triggered her special ability.

Something flashed out in front of her, brown and cream and tall, and she saw the air distort as the hologram raced away from her. Then it slowed to human speed and walked out in front of her, away from the columns. It held its gun at rest like she did, but moved with less strategy, less intelligence. She couldn't say that she thought it moved like her: it moved like the average person.

She took a few steps back against the column and wondered whether the hologram could shoot fake bullets. That would be really distracting and very helpful. Maybe if she went around the side to the right, Maine would attack the hologram from the left and she could pop out where he wouldn't expect.

These thoughts took seconds. They were more images than words, as she pictured the scenario playing out. She moved one foot.

The hologram flickered. She still couldn't see Maine on the HUD but she thought that he must be doing something, because the brown-armored simulacrum was flickering like it had done when it first appeared.

She shot toward it. Her pink paint bullets hit something in midair and splattered, painting flat planes of armor with white flecks at the edge. So Maine was there. A few more shots went wide. She thought that she already had one point on him: he still had to get three.

But he gave no more sign of where he was located. She moved around the column, daring a few feet of no visibility to get a new angle while the hologram still stood, dumb and alert, as her bait. A few tense seconds passed.

Maine tackled the hologram. There was no more subtle word for his action: he didn't shoot, he didn't fight, he just jumped like an animal, his gun holstered at his waist. She couldn't tell what direction he had come from. The hologram disappeared beneath him.

She shot him again. He shot back, pink flakes flying off his bulky white armor and she ducked behind the column again while paint splattered past her face.  
If she put the hologram out he would just go invisible and stalk either her or it.

It was like playing Tic-Tac-Toe. Adults couldn't do it because the strategy was too obvious. They got bored.

But Connie and Maine still had guns. They would need to just face each other eventually, without either kind of hiding.

And she was winning two to nothing.

Two shots came from behind her, in quick succession. One hit the wall and burst. The other hit her in the face, blinding half of her visor with pink. She pushed backward, blearily, feeling the thick struts on the back of her armor hit the wall far sooner than she expected her skin to. Disoriented, she shot once at random and then turned and dashed around the other side of the column, now having gone in a 360 around it, to stand where her hologram had been.

Maine barreled out from between two columns, fired, and hit her again. Two to two. The others were watching. Connie glanced down and saw the symbol of her hologram switch from red to blue. Hopefully she could use it again, although it would help if she had a plan -

Instead she just fired back. She made Maine put his head down and hide behind a column, ducking out of sight.

Maybe he really was out of sight. She thought she could still hear his armor creaking, maybe footsteps -

She thought, might as well fire in the direction you least want your enemy to be if he could be anywhere, and jumped backwards.

She fired a few feet away from her, filling the air with pink splotches. Some of them resolved around the hulking form of Maine, barely a few feet away. He snapped back to invisibility, shot for the third time now. She had won: he should be stopping but he was not instead letting his momentum carry him forward and he slammed into her.

His weight carried both of them to the floor. Once he was down he slammed his forearms against the floor on either side of her, a ringing sound that seemed to bash against her ears, breathed once, and looked at her. Should have triggered the hologram then, she thought. I could have just stepped to the side, stepped out of it like it was a second skin and I was shedding.

She looked up at him. He stepped off her gingerly. "Sorry."

"Sorry?" She sat up, both knees on the floor first because she felt pretty ginger about it all too. "I was the one who shot you."

"I sat on you," he grunted, and she smiled begrudgingly.

"Match complete," said FILSS. "Victor: Agent Connecticut."

She beamed. She had won something. Maybe she would end up on the board now.

She and Maine walked off the field together. The tech came out to greet them but retreated back into the hallway when she saw them, as if she had only been going to go out if they had refused to go in. Connie locked eyes with her for a moment to see if she would ask any questions about the augmentations, but she did not.

"It didn't hurt," Connie said to Maine. "He said the special abilities might feel strange without an AI."

Maine grunted what sounded like an assent. Connie liked that he wasn't a sore loser, although she would also have liked to know more about what he felt. Did he care about his place on the board? What did he care about?

When she rejoined the group she headed for Wash but found South first. "Did it hurt?" South asked, and Connie shook her head.

"It didn't feel like anything. Which one did you get?"

"I can make a domed energy shield," she said. "The same as North."

"Good luck."

"Thanks. I might just need it."

Connie stood beside Wash, almost wiggling with excitement. "I won," she said, and repeated it because she had been holding too much of the excitement in. "I won."

"I saw," he said. "You did good."

The director called the next two names, and when York and South went down to the arena Connie craned forward with the rest of the Freelancers to watch.

The director stood straight and stuff, with his pale hands behind his back and his eyes shadowed behind the green tint of his dark glasses


	7. Chapter 7

That evening at dinner time it felt like a week had passed since the morning. The board glowed blue over by the countertop where they got their food but Connie didn't pay much attention to it. (Except for a glance at the beginning, when she walked into the room. She had checked to see if her name was there, but her first stumbling attempts toward prowess in the augmentation trials had not gotten her name to number eight, or anywhere else. Of course it hadn't, not with Carolina moving across the arena as fast as a spaceship, dashing from one trooper to another and inflicting them with hits that surely sent some of them to medical with broken bones. Not with Wyoming doing whatever he had done that had left them all light-headed and with a sense of deja-vu.)

She set her tray down next to Wash and watched him bite into an apple and chew. When he swallowed she picked up her fork and said, "So what did you get?"

He said, "I got this EMP thing."

"Electromagnetic pulse?"

"Yeah. It disables electronics."

"That sounds useful."

"He nodded. It can take down cars...even small ships. It works on armor too, so I have to make sure the rest of my team is out of range...or that I don't like them very much." He smiled wryly.

"So it must not affect your armor."

"No. The blast has an interior radius and an exterior radius. The way it's set up, the interior radius is just a few inches. I could have problems with some systems depending on the way I'm standing. Actually I..." He laughed, looked over at North and York. "Look."

Connie came around the other side of the table, noticing other people start to look up, as Wash stood.

He started gesturing. "The EMP - " he pronounced it, smoothly, 'Emp', and since it didn't seem to bother him she wasn't going to point it out in the middle of whatever revelation he was about to have. "emanates from the emitter on this part of the armor." He clapped his right hand against his left forearm. "So if I keep my back and my other arm turned away as much as possible, it has less chance of affecting my systems.

South said, "So basically you act like it's an icky spider and you want to get it off?"

Wash hesitated, took a few steps. "Um. Well. If I stand like this - " and he threw one hand up in the air and looked up at the ceiling. Connie watched the way his neck curved and strained. "It has less chance of touching me."

North and Carolina laughed, Maine's deep laughter following after like a slow echo. Wash sighed and slumped, and York and Connie smiled.

Wash said, "Maybe it looks a little silly."

"Don't do that on the battlefield," Carolina said seriously. "You'll just get shot."

"I have alternatives," Wash said. Connie looked behind her to see if there was anything that she could lean on but the table was taken up by people. Carolina just looked up at her.

Wash said, "If I crouch down, the surface of the floor should redirect some of the waves. I'm not sure. There may not be actual...science involved. But like this."

He crouched, one knee up and the other leg flat against the floor, and raised his hand.

Connie smiled. He looked ridiculous, but he also did look like a superhero. North chuckled again, and York burst out laughing.

"I love you, man! Keepin' it classy."

"See," said North. "That's awesome. He knows what he's doing."

Wash stood up, bowed to each of them. When he went back to the table he slipped a hand around Connie's waist on the way and sat with her for the rest of the meal, his left elbow occasionally knocking against her right as they ate.

She saw, on the far wall in an alcove where no one sat, that the names on the board had only shuffled slightly.

Carolina  
York  
Wyoming  
Washington  
North Dakota  
Florida  
Maine  
South Dakota

No Connecticut.

But she had won.

"I don't understand." She looked aside at Wash, sudden;y feeling twitchy and frantic. "I did good on my test. Why am I not on the board?"

Wash looked at it too, pensive and chewing. "I don't know."

Connie muttered, "I don't understand what they want me to do to win."

"It's not about winning." Wash finished his food and turned his attention to her. "It's just about being the best soldier you can."

She looked back and forth from him to the board, wondering whether he felt the pressure that she did. She had to succeed.

She realized that antics with the EMP meant that Wash had not been concerned by the sudden appearance of the augmentation or of one-on-one combat. Wash did not see either of those things as a problem. He was and always would be around the middle of the board, holding his own, usually bested by York or Carolina in combat between them but always able to beat the sim troopers the director threw at him. Wash was steady, reliable, neither the leader of the team nor something ancillary. (Like Connecticut.)

She pressed her palm against her chin and leaned into her own skin, watching Wash as he returned to his meal.

Washington the Wild West, the great frontier, the Northwest Passage, the end to the means of America, and Connie had folded the country at the Mississippi, not slowly through erosion but in floods and rockslides and storms of love, in half to get to him.

She clung to him even more fiercely as the training went on, and instead of regretting this he accepted and reciprocated it.

* * *

Sitting in Wash's room with North and Maine on one bed, York on Wash's and Wash and Connie and South on the floor with their backs against the wall they heard the one time York worried about Carolina: "She doesn't talk as much as she used to."

"I'm sure she's just stressed," Wash said, "about staying on top of the board," and York looked at the corner of the room like it was deep space or the clouds above the Great Plains.

"She doesn't have to be," he said. "I'm afraid she's hurting herself."

It was the idea that she doesn't have to be that stuck with Connie.

Because Connie tried and stressed. She fought harder, found herself slipping more often or noticing it more often. She noticed and cursed herself for every shot she missed. Some times she did not take chances that she could have: she did not dodge around the side, did not choose a payload that felt right but was unusual for the given scenario. She kept learning the special assignments given to her. The director knew that she was good at computers and numbers, more so than both with imagining that digital scenarios were real places. York moved digital locks with all the tactility of a locksmith who worked in iron and copper: Connie could use a keyboard in the same way. She liked radio noise and telephone lines: she liked shortcuts and letters and abbreviated names. Long pathways made into two small movements, a press of a button or two.

(CT.)

After afternoon exercises (teamwork) she talked to York about it. He found her, actually, sitting on a bench in the locker room. She had wanted someone to, but hadn't expected it to be York. Anyone except Carolina would have done. Wash would be best but she would probably not have talked to him, just buried her face against his shoulder and maybe talked about something else. Maps, secrets, television. Their usual in-jokes and references and whatever got them through, except it was more often her needing to get through and him just going.

York said, "What's wrong, man?" and sat down on the bench instead of going to his own locker.

She said, "Are you here for a reason, York?"

"Yeah. I had to get my towel. To go take a shower."

"So you need to go there, then."

"I could. Or I could sit here. Unless I smell or something. Do I?" He lifted an armored arm.

"No," she said. "You smell like the rest of us."

"Sweat and tears?"

"Armor."

"Huh." He shrugged. "Well. Connie, I do not think you are sitting here because you find it the most thrilling thing in the world. What's wrong?"

She shook her head, looked at the floor. He was close to Carolina. She wasn't one hundred percent sure that they were dating, if you could call it that in space without a coffee shop or movies, but they were together often enough. He would be sympathetic to Carolina.

But he was York. He would probably be nice to her too.

He was on the top of the board.

Why did that not matter?

She wasn't sure. Maybe because he was nicer. Carolina had gotten increasingly quiet and angry over the last few days, and Connie was sure that York was seeing it too. Maybe he was concerned as well.

She said, "I've been thinking about the board. Carolina's always been on the top. I...it's not fair that she's always been there. What did she do to deserve it?"

"She must have scored the best," York said very calmly.

"According to the mysterious director system."

"According to the plan of the man who recruited us, yeah."

"I just don't like it." She shook her head. "It makes it hard to room with her."

"Are you two not getting along?"

"No, but...we don't really talk. She doesn't talk to me. And I...I just don't know if I want to be her friend right now."

"If you were number one, you wouldn't want people to hate you."

"I didn't say hate, York," she said quietly, and looked at her hands. Then she looked at him, somehow freed to do so by appearing to be scared. She wasn't scared, really. She was right.

He said, "I know."

"And yes I would," she said. She looked into his visor as if she could see through it into the back of his head. Wash goofing around in the afternoon after getting their special augmentations seemed like it was so much more than a few days ago. How could she feel so happy then - with him goofing off but also doing so in a way that showed how smart he was, how proud she was of him - and so devastated and trapped now? "I'd be proud of them. That's the only way I'd know they really wanted my place. That's my proof. And it's the only way that they'd ever succeed too, because you have to be angry enough to go after something."

"You'd see it differently if you were in her place."

"Maybe."

"I didn't use anger to get to my spot."

"I know." She let some time pass: so did he. Then she said, "Don't you get angry, York?"

"I dunno, I just...do my best. I do all the training."

Her thoughts spiraled inward, not thinking about the training, but about the mindset that was necessary for it. "How can not worrying about success lead to success?"

(She thought, Wash would say he didn't know. He worries a little too.)

"Worrying won't help," said York.

"Carolina worries," said Connie.

York glanced to the side and she knew she was right. Carolina refused to be good to herself, and against the odds that was how she succeeded. Anger let her jump higher and run faster.

"That may be true," said York slowly, "but it's not right."

Connie said, "I know. Maybe."

He put a hand on her shoulder, shook her a little. "It's okay, kid. You'll be fine. I'm gonna hit the showers," he said, and stood up and stretched. He gave her one quick look over his shoulder. "Try not to be too hard on yourself, okay?"

"Bye, York."

"Bye Connie!"

He waved. He went away.

* * *

In Wash's room Connie ran her hands over his forearms, feeling the bones and the veins. "You look like a superhero today." She smiled, blushed. he kissed her on the cheek.

"And you're getting better with that hologram. So does this mean I can have two of you?"

Her laugh was awkward and he knew he had made it awkward so he laughed it off too. She said, "I don't think it works like that."

Then he moved his hands to her hips and found the notch of her hip bone, pushing his thumbs against her skin in small, heavy circles, and she didn't think about much any more.

* * *

The first clue, the first suggestion that she might have something rather than frustration and anger to explain why her dissatisfaction with herself was becoming dissatisfaction with the program, was how still the Alpha stood in the classroom the next morning. He practically stumbled into existence. He immediately stood up, snapping into normalcy, but his head was hanging low, and his voice sounded tired.

"No abuse today?" South sapped at the AI. "I thought that's what you liked best, hating on us helpless humans."

Alpha ignored her.

"He looks sick," Connie said, and Carolina replied without looking at her. "It isn't possible."

"He doesn't have a stomach," North muttered, and South snorted with laughter.

Over the next few days they saw Alpha only a few more times, as he monitored them as they were sent out on training missions, and he went back to normal. He stood normally, he spoke loudly, he mocked and abused and cursed. York and South were relieved. Florida called him "my boy" a lot. Carolina looked at Connie. "See? He isn't sick."

"AI can't get sick," Connie repeated, and she half believed it.

* * *

"You messed up!"

Carolina never screamed like this. Just this once because they had come back from a mission more brutal than any before. The director had told them to thin the ranks of the Insurrectionists so the Freelancer heavies - Carolina, Maine, York - had gone in to do that. 479 just dropped them at a facility, something about cryogenics, and the director had told them to withdraw when most of the enemy was dead. It was a scare tactic, a threat. The facility was set into the wall of a cliff, maybe using natural ice from the pole of the planet to work its science, but Connie didn't know. She just knew she had gone in with the others and ended up using her pistols and knives as well as her rifle, emptying her clips and then pulling a knife out of someone's rib cage to keep fighting. The Insurrectionists in their patched-together armor looked thing and disorganized next to the heavily armored, colored Freelancers. The Freelancers were patriotic toward a country made up of only themselves. That made them strong and it was heady.

But now, standing in the hanger just stumbled out of the Pelican and most of them covered with blood, and Connie had been the last one out. The Pelican had waited for her, because, she didn't know why. 479 had made that choice. And Carolina had been there watching the whole time, wanting to hide behind the navigator's seat but unable because she had to babysit Connie.

"You could have died out there," Carolina yelled, pointing at Connie in a fit of rage the younger Freelancer had never seen in her before, and then Carolina hammered the point home - "That was just how Maryland died, being slow."

Connie backed away, wondering why Carolina was doing this. Why was she so angry?

She must be afraid that she would never been fast enough.

The program had done this to her.

At the same time Connie's reaction was not dispassionate: she was tired and hurt and almost shivering with stress, and the sight of the others, her friends, dappled with blood did not help her.

"I did the best I could while you hid in the Pelican!" she fired back, and 479 drew her breath in so loud Connie knew the pilot was going to make a crack about catfights next, and Connie looked back and forth at all the people who weren't Carolina.

(That night Carolina said she was sorry, just in passing as they crossed one another's paths on the way to the bathroom, and Connie made a sound that was supposed to be "okay" or "I forgive you", but because she couldn't decide came out as just a puff of breath.)

* * *

She was almost ready. In the classroom, looking at Alpha: in her room, looking at the ceiling, she wondered what she could do about her misgivings, her hatred and fear, and thought about leaving. She would go back to the UNSC. It wouldn't be defection if they would take her. She would join another squad, have another specialty. Maybe she would man a desk and have to give the hologram back. She would wait for Wash to finish his tour and they would - maybe they would settle down somewhere, or, she thought to make herself remember reality and not be so devastated when it didn't live up to her dreams, maybe they would just meet, once at a coffee shop on a terrace overlooking the sea.

She started doing some research. The UNSC had an oversight committee, called, creatively enough, the Oversight Committee - its chairman was no one she recognized, but she didn't expect to know the name. There was a number there to call. Admittedly it was for news, press, not for internal complaints - but maybe she could use it.

And one day she was talking with Carolina - back from the mess or the classroom or training it didn't matter, except that they were both in armor with their helmets under their arms (Connie's ugly and useless and she hadn't had to disarm any bombs yet, and Carolina's two-faced like Janus). They were walking together because Connie had tagged along with Carolina, wanting a familiar face (a familiar body, familiar smell, everything after they had roomed together long enough) and Carolina had been okay with this. (Connie, like Wash, sometimes went through life asking for permission to live it.)

They were walking near the hangars, taking a long way that was usually quiet, until Connie heard something metal roll across the floor.

She looked behind her and to Carolina's right toward a hallway that lead to the hangar proper and where people were likely to be doing mechanical work. A red warning light was on indicating that a ship would be taking off or landing soon, but the blast doors all along the corridor were open instead of closed against potential shifts in pressure. "Did you hear that?"

Carolina glanced up, one graceful turn of her neck. "What?"

"It sounded like..."

The rolling sound got louder, and Connie stopped just in time to see a bolt roll out of the short hallway and fetch up against the wall. It had made a loud, echoing sound for such a small thing, even if it was the heavy material used for starships, and Connie thought that there must be a ship going in or out. Surely this bolt hadn't fallen off it, but she had the sense that there was some odd pressure change in the air that she didn't have enough knowledge of either words or science to express. Something was moving through.

"Wait." She paused.

Carolina said, "A mechanic's going to need to come get that or someone will be after him."

She moved to scoop up the bolt, but when she got within a few steps she could see all the way through to the hanger. The walls inside were lit slightly with blue from the force fields around it. She heard footsteps and put her back against the opposite wall, in an instinctual reaction like a child trying not to be caught up past her bedtime: Carolina kept looking at her from the safety of the parallel hallway, the older sister unamused by the younger one frightened of monsters.

A pack of people walked through the hanger, past the hallway where Connie lurked. First a mechanic ran by, obviously looking for his bolt, but a second later he passed the director, the counselor, and a row of four pilots going in the opposite direction.

Connie held her breath.

"There is nothing to be concerned about," the director was saying. The counselor, predictably, didn't make a sound. Connie inched toward the end of the hall, curious about what they were saying, knowing that the mechanic would be back any minute now. She glanced back at Carolina, who was crouched at the end of the hall, almost comical in her dramatic stance with her knees bent and her head turning from side to side. She completed the look of a concerned child when she pointed with both hands at the hallway from which they had both just come.

_Get back here._

Connie put her helmet on and dialed up her audio filters.

The director said, "The process will go as smoothly as can be expected when we have the proper equipment. I fail to see why you would wish to have this discussion now."

The counselor replied, "We are moving into the second phase."

"Second phase?" The director turned around. Connie could hear his boots squeak. "We are moving into the only phase where we are taking any new action. Do you wish us just to sit around?"

"The commissioning of a capitol ship," said the counselor, "is not a phase which I would call...inactive, director."

"You know what I mean." Did the director sound petulant? Childish, even? He was being denied something, or thought that he might be. "We must continue. We must fulfill the purpose for which we came here. We created the ground we walk on, counselor."

"However, the next step has not been tested. You have seen how ONI has dealt with...those who stand out in the field before."

"It does not matter to me what Lord Hood thinks, counselor, and ONI's attempts at psychological bullying cannot touch me here. And I beg you to consider why you wish to discuss this now rather than before. Little has changed except that you have met the Alpha in person. Does he seem too familiar to you, counselor?"

"No, sir." That voice, so sleepy. Always heavy-lidded.

Other footsteps were suddenly headed toward Connie, coming fast. They broke her out of a funk she had barely noticed she was in. She sprinted back toward the hallway, her footsteps alarmingly loud.

A man in a white suit like a pilot but without the wing markings on the front skidded around the corner after her. She could almost see him narrow his eyes through the mask. "There you are," he said, eyes fixed on the bolt at the end of the hallway, and stalked toward it.

Connie walked around the corner toward Carolina, trying to look like she hadn't been running at all. She had just been passing by. Yeah, that was right. That hallway wasn't important.

_It does not matter to me what Lord Hood thinks._

Carolina glared.

"Oh, sorry ma'am," said the pilot or tech or whatever he was as he caught sight of Connie, and scooped up the bolt.

"Hey!" Connie's shoulders jumped as she turned to face the same way Carolina was, and even Carolina stood a little straighter as footsteps stamped down the hallway. Connie knew who it would be from the voice before 479 came into view.

"Get back here, you," 479 crowed, and made like to hit the mechanic over the back of the head. "What are you doing." He scurried back toward the hanger, and the pilot looked up at Connie. "Sorry, ma'am. He's all over the place."

"I'm sure he's just...having an off day," Connie said, not sure why she wanted to stand up for him but knowing that she didn't like to be the runt of the group, and 479 tipped her head at her, not unlike Wash.

"Whatever," said the pilot, and walked away.

Connie rushed down the hall. Carolina was still there waiting for her, standing straight with her arms folded and her back to the wall but not pressed against it. She wasn't scared of being caught. She had done nothing wrong anyway, and she must have moved out of the way before the mechanic moved past the corner.

"I should have gotten out of there before he came around," Connie said. If she admitted to her mistakes first no one could use them against her later.

"I guess I just think a little faster, Connie." Carolina said it jokingly, warmly, like a big sister - but the words sat in Connie's mind and twisted up, emerged back out as hatred both that Carolina had said it, casually gloating, and that such an offhand comment could have stuck with Connie and bothered her.

She could have thought faster, though. That was what she was supposed to be good at. She could have used her hologram, maybe, or just...just gotten out of there.

But she needed to know.

And what the director had been talking about didn't sound like it would be a job for the Oversight Committee if he had already gone over what parts of the UNSC did and did not support him.

Connie said, "Did you hear what they said?"

Carolina said, "No. What was it?"

If the director was doing wrong, maybe his enemies were doing right.

To get an outside perspective, she could only talk to the Insurrection. To those people she had seen on the last mission, as bloodied as the Freelancers. Everyone here was under the director's thumb or on his payroll.

She would have to get in touch with them. It would be a conspiracy from inside. It would make her the shadowy organization in control, the people who pulled the strings and told the president what to say. It would mean she knew more than the other Freelancers. It would mean that she, alone, was better. Number one on a board of her own making.

To Carolina she said, "Nothing."

(She never did find out where the director was going and why he had been talking about the Alpha, although she wondered about it on the _Mother Invention_ and on the _Staff of Charon_ , in her bunk and Wash's bunk and on a pile of sandbags at Longshore where she slept opposite the glaring blonde melee expert because Joshua had offered her his bunk and she had shied away from it.

But later, after she saw the video of the woman waving goodbye to the director as he held the camera, calling him Leonard, she thought maybe that he had been - although he would always put duty first, always have lists and rosters to distribute, would always carry the leader board in his pocket - going to visit her grave.)


	8. Chapter 8

"Your task is to find one data chip that will be hidden in the Insurrectionists' computer room," the director said to the assembled Freelancers in the briefing room. Laid out on the table before them was the map of another Insurrectionist base, this one smaller and newer-looking than the desiccated warehouse. "For this reason," the director said, "Agent Connecticut will have a critical role in this mission, extracting the data."

Connie looked up. She was glad that she had her helmet on, because she was sure that he could see the guilt in her face - _he knows I overheard him, he knows I'm planning something._ (What she was planning yet she wasn't even sure, but maybe the director's flat black eyes knew better than she did.)

But he moved on from her and said, "Agents Carolina, Washington, and the Dakotas will accompany her." The twins glanced at one another, maybe surprised by the confluence of their names. "Agent Carolina will be fire team leader."

Carolina nodded, as if this fit with her view of the world.

"The rest of you will back her up and invade the base. The rest is up to you and Alpha."

Connie latched onto the word 'invade'. He hadn't said 'infiltrate'. This was not going to be - was not supposed to be - a quiet mission.

She asked, "What's on the chip?"

"Information that will tell us how many ships the Insurrectionists have in their fleet," the director said calmly. She did not think that he had ever heard him be so level to her specifically. It was almost like he was talking to someone else. "They have recently acquired some that are..quite seizable, but we do not know enough about them."

She said, "Thank you, sir."

So it was to be a quiet mission about spaceships.

And Alpha was going to help somehow.

The director said that the AI was supposed to meet the five Freelancers at the hanger. North and South were rolling their shoulders, craning their necks like they were carrying heavy suitcases. North's sniper rifle and South's battle rifle were magnetized not to their backs but to the walls inside the Pelican, already ready to go. Connie looked across at Carolina, surprised every time she really thought about the fact that Carolina was shorter than her. Carolina walked like she was taller, had longer legs. She defied her short waist and the brusque, thick, punchy silhouette of her arms and thin shoulders.  
And Connie, also short-waisted but long-limbed, feeling like she was going to fall over.

She caught Wash's eye and he reached out and tapped the armor over his forearm against hers, a solid, brotherly reassurance. _I'm here. We'll get back okay._

 _I'm going to try to talk to one of them,_ Connie thought. _I'm going to tell an Insurrectionist that I want to be on his side, and we will see if he will or will not kill me._

She tapped Wash's arm with hers, returning the gesture, without looking at him.

They had never seen Alpha in the hangar before, and Connie would not have guessed that 479 did not necessarily know that the AI existed for all she or other pilots talked about them. They waited for a few minutes that felt like a long time.

South said, "I thought Alpha was supposed to show up."

Connie said, "I did too."

"Any minute now he's going to be late." Carolina shook her head.

"I'm sure he's on his way," North said.

"Whatever 'on his way' means for an AI," Wash said. He sounded concerned too.

"Are we allowed to go without him?" Connie asked.

Carolina uncrossed her arms. "We might have to. What do we know about the mission already?"

"We've got the map downloaded," North said.

"And the placements of their turrets...if they're right," Wash said.

Connie liked when Wash doubted the information he was given. It didn't happen often enough. It was like finding a mythological creature.

479 clattered out of the Pelican. "Hey. The boss says we should take off now. You ready?"

"We were supposed to be waiting for Alpha - " Wash started, but Carolina cut him off. Connie bit back her words, although she wanted to come to his defense.

"We're ready," Carolina said. "Get in, everybody."

"Yes ma'am," South said sarcastically.

"I wonder what's up with the director," North said. "It's not like him to send Alpha late."

"So what?" South said. "So we don't have our GPS on this trip."

(Later, Connie would realize, and maybe the others did too, that South's dislike for the AI was not due to her feeling left out and deprived of one. As far as Connie knew, South had an AI to look forward to. Instead, she tolerated exactly as much of what she viewed as imperfection in AI as she did in humans. South was an equal-opportunity hater, and sometimes this manifested as bravery.)

"Okay," Carolina said. "We're going anyway."

Connie dimly heard North say "Saddle up," and then she was clomping into the Pelican with the rest of them. Wash dropped heavily into a seat and she followed, wanting suddenly to be outside the ship and not to have the excuse to go down and talk to the Insurrectionists. She wanted to have picked something else when she went for the computer during her first trial in front of the director. She wanted to be curled up in bed.

Instead, the Pelican rumbled and she watched the walls, unable to see the hangar sliding by and then the black shock of space without craning her neck toward 479 in the cockpit. Carolina had taken her usual seat up near the pilot, leaving North and South on one side of the ship and Wash and Connie on the other. Connie wondered where York was and what he was thinking. Would it bother him that he hadn't been asked along? Wash and North were the firepower on this mission. Although South had recently shown an aptitude for heavy weapons too, she was usually used as support.

The ride down to the planet was brief. The Mother of Invention had parked close. Either the Insurrectionists didn't have ships and anti-aircraft guns, or they weren't well enough liked on this planet to show their presence in such a big way. Either way, 479 parked the Pelican in a wooded area not far from a small, new-looking building set back from a city. Unlike the warehouse there was no immediate sign of structural weakness or an easy way in. Like the warehouse, dirt roads worn to ruts by the passage of many heavy vehicles indicated that the place was occupied by a sizable militarized force. The walls of the building were clean and white, with brown struts. It looked not so much like a military installation as like a home. One outbuilding sat next to it, painted in the same colors. Someone had cared enough to make these buildings match. Probably, they had been intended for commerce instead of civil war.

"I can't stand these Innies," South muttered. "Can't they just petition for rights like regular people?"

"Now South," said North, "We don't know what their stories are. Just because they're with a bad group doesn't mean that individually they're bad people."  
"But we're going to shoot them anyway, right?" His sister sounded nonplussed.

North said, "That's right."

Carolina clambered down from her seat in the bridge. "Connie." She pinned Connie with a stare, and the younger Freelancer pushed up her restraint and stood, feeling slightly unbalanced after being cocooned in her jump seat. Wash glanced at her.

Carolina said, "Your job is to get inside and find the data. The rest of us are here to protect you. Stay with me and Wash at all times. North, find a sniper position and stay there. South, you're with him."

"Of course I am," she muttered.

"Good. I'll need some cover. If you get pinned down retreat back up the hill and call in to activate your shield. With both of us shielded we should be able to hold out while the others are inside...right?" He tipped his head at Wash, who nodded a couple times assertively. North started giving South more specific instructions - "When I find a place to camp out you range out along the bottom..." and Connie zoned out, focusing instead on her own task. She had no idea where the data was kept - but of course she didn't. She had been picked because she was supposed to be able to think on her feet...and maybe locate computers using digital psychic abilities, or something.

That would make her more likely to succeed, anyway.

Carolina looked over at her. "You ready?"

"Yes." She got the sense that she was going to talk into the middle of something bigger than her.

Wash stood up, and then 479 was yelling for them to get out of the ship and Connie dashed out the door, her boots sliding in the dirt. The Innies were ready for them. Gunshots hit the ground as soon as Carolina and Connie showed their heads outside the Pelican. Connie saw Carolina spread her arms out as if to either protect and embrace or herd Connie toward the building. "Go, go!"

Connie ran. She heard the deep sound of Wash and South's assault rifles and the higher-pitched zing of the sniper rifle as North fired, surely backing up as he did. Connie pulled her pistols - one of hers and one of Maryland's - from her side and ducked low. There wasn't any time to scope the bad guys out from this distance at this speed.

With Carolina covering her and her mind not even having time to race she got to the door and slammed her palms against it, twisting the handle so hard that it snapped. They didn't need York for this mission, though, and the director had known that - the building was new or the Innies were lazy or the director had put some kind of plan in place before the Freelancers even got here.

They surely had someone guarding that door.

Connie signaled for Carolina to flank the door on the right side, behind where it would open. and she did so without question, although she said "What's your plan?" over the radio.

"Watch," Connie said, and triggered her hologram. The world got blurry as the hologram imposed itself in the few inches between her and the door, and she thought that with a complete overlap she could really confuse people. She opened the door and jumped to the left side, leaving the hologram where it was.  
What looked like multiple streams of gunfire converged on the hologram. It ran forward, flickering, and Connie and Carolina charged in on its tail. The hallway was barely wide enough to contain them in file and filled with gunfire, but Connie's first pistol shot downed someone in black armor at the far end of the short hall. Carolina shouted in her earpiece, not a word but just a growl to go with her forward momentum.

The hall was only eight steps long and ended in a crossroads. Connie ducked to the left, saw a moving body, and punched the barrel of her pistol into its chest. The masked Innie doubled over. When she shot him he almost fell onto her arm, and by the time she stepped back Carolina had dispatched two more that had fallen in the other two arms of the cross like macabre signs pointing which way to go.

"Looks like they didn't have much to throw at us," Carolina said. The hallway was empty.

"Upstairs," Connie said. "They'll probably have the files in a far room."

She liked that she sounded like she knew what she was talking about. She wondered if Carolina could tell.

Resistance was minimal, although they heard gunfire from outside, and Connie wondered where Wash had gone. He hadn't needed to follow them into the hallway and probably knew that, or was going to follow shortly to pick up any stragglers. He knew what he was doing. (She would have to shake him later if she was going to talk to an Innie alone. She had to kill them when she found them with Carolina at her side. Wash would be easier to get away from.  
Later.)

They charged up a switchbacking metal stairway into an identical hallway. From the pipes on the ceiling she could tell immediately that they had central cooling in here, which was a good bet to say that the computer room was on this floor. If the Innies knew what they were coming for, or wanted to protect their data at all, the placement of their guards would lead the Freelancers right to the most important pieces of information.

(How would they know what the Freelancers were coming for? They didn't have anyone on the inside. Not as far as she knew. She would find out. Maybe there would be someone else. Wyoming? Florida? Someone odd in the other group, someone who felt just slightly off? What did a traitor act like?)  
At the top of the stairs, neck-and-neck with Carolina now that the way was wider and scared any minute that Carolina might barge on ahead, Connie heard a window break and a woman scream. It wasn't South's voice. North had probably shot an Innie sniper out a window. Connie kept going, breathing harder now.

"Everything okay in there?" It was Wash's voice over the radio, and Connie felt her stomach lurch.

"We're fine," Connie answered, too fast, just as a dark-armored Innie popped out of a door halfway down the hallway in front of her. She heard him curse through his mask. There were two more behind him. Connie reached out to point her pistol at them just as Carolina opened fire too, the bolts blasting past Connie's head. One door guard went down.

"We're fine," Connie said, more snappish than she'd planned.

"Do your job!" Carolina growled, just as snappish. Connie assumed she was talking to Wash but had second thoughts a moment later and stepped further into the hallway. The gunfire subsided, but there was still at least one other person in the guarded room.

Connie sent out a hologram. (Carolina's ability, a burst of speed, wouldn't do much good in the narrow hallway, but she wondered if she was going to use it anyway.)

Two other guards moved out of the hallway to attack the hologram, and Carolina shot both. They fell against the walls, a barrier to Connie's destination. The hologram paused attentively at the doorway, looking around, dumbly scouting like a bird dog.

"Move in," Carolina said, but Connie had already been on her way. She moved slowly to the hallway, crossing one foot in front of the other like the hallway was a house she knew and she could prevent stepping on the creaky boards if she just walked right.

There was one person still in the room. She could see him dash to the side. The room had a bank of low computer terminals set against a wall that looked out over the field where 479 had landed her Pelican. Connie took two long steps in with her pistol held out in front of her with both hands.

The Insurrectionist shot at her arm. One bullet glanced off her armor, and she thought she heard it tear a strip of plaster off of the wall.

She slammed into the man, feeling out of control and like they were both just going to fall over for a moment until she wedged his arm against hers and felt her attempt at an arm bar actually catch. He screeched and she changed the hold, turning him to face the wall and holding his wrist in both of her armored hands. She had to use much less force than she was used to like this. The armor magnified everything. His gun, also a small pistol, dropped to the floor.  
She looked down at the squirming Insurrectionist and said, "We're here for data about your fleet. Where is it?"

Carolina stalked into the room to her left, headed for the bank of computers near the window, and Connie only took passing notice of her.

"Where is it?" she said, unsubtle, breaking the Insurrectionist's wrist, not sure if this would work. It worked in movies. Carolina stepped over the man like she didn't care what Connie did and didn't have any useful input on whether it would work, but then she stopped and looked over Connie's victim's shoulder at her. Waiting. Connie continued under that judgmental gaze. "Where is the data about your fleet?"

"We don't have a fleet. Argh."

"I know you do." Connie didn't know what else to say. What if they didn't?

"Oh. That fleet. You mean the ship?" He stretched out his other arm, stiff and awkwardly bent, toward a console in the corner. Not the center one, not conspicuous.

Connie met Carolina's eyes. "What is it?" she said to the man. She kept twisting his wrist, but no further than before. His bones were clicking. "On a chip, a file, what?"

"A disk. It's right there."

Carolina nodded.

Connie dropped the man's arm. He fell to the floor and braced himself on his forearms. She still couldn't see his face. She turned away to head toward the computer and heard Carolina shoot him.

It really was just a disk, sticking out of a slot. A little black piece of plastic, the size of her palm or smaller. It would have been easy enough to snap in half. It was unmarked.

She thought of saying 'What, is this it, you didn't really need me here,' and reconsidered. Carolina might consider it too hard.

"This is what I need," she said, and looked at the other Freelancer. Carolina was standing sideways to the door, watching it with her gun held low and one hand tapping flat on the barrel like it was a drum and she was the quiet backdrop beat to some melody.

"That's it?" said Carolina, and Connie felt her stomach turn. Even if Connie hadn't said it, Carolina knew anyway. She was thinking the same thing. Connie was expendable, even on the mission that she had been supposed to lead. She was along for the ride.

"Yeah, that's got to be it." Connie looked down, slipped the chip into the small case that served as a pocket on the right hip of her armor. The black was barely visible against the brown armor. It could have been a component that was supposed to go there. "I could look for more," she said, needing to do the job as thoroughly as Carolina wanted to. If they left now and she had been wrong -or if the man now lying dead on the floor had been lying while she crushed his hand between hers - Carolina would never forgive her. Neither would the director. No one would.

Carolina nodded. "Do it."

Connie sighed and turned back to the computers, frustrated and sure she wouldn't find anything else. People traded shots down below, and through the reflections on the windows she thought she saw a purple blob move between trees and hills as South protected North. Where was Wash? He would be a gray blob. His armor made him surprisingly hard to see between shadows.

(He wasn't what she needed to be looking for right now anyway.)

She joggled mouses and tapped on touch-screens, waking the computers up. She searched menus as quickly as she could, flagging secure files and shunting them into a folder she could extract when she got back to the Mother of Invention. She would leave a little bug in here that would upload the information to a cloud she could access and then delete it on the original computer. They would never know where it had gone, and could not use the bug as a back door.  
Simple stuff.

She hadn't expected, when she was told that she would be a special agent, to be shunting files around.

But she heard Carolina shift and realized that she had been distracted by a task that was simple for her. She should still be straining to sense that gooseflesh feeling that meant someone might be aiming a gun at her back. She should still trust her team and stick to the mission.

But their mission was not hers.

It would be safer for her, in the long run if not immediately, for her to talk to an Insurrectionist in person, but she could modify the bug so that it stayed in the system, so that the Innies could trace where it had gone.

She did that with a dry mouth and a sudden, overwhelming sense of fear. Task completed, she turned back to Carolina and crossed the room. "Done."

"Got it?"

"Anything not on this disk I can recover back on the ship."

"Good."

Connie thought that maybe she should say thank you.

If she left the program for good, caught as a traitor or just gone, maybe she would never had to worry about what Carolina thought she should say again.  
But leaving wouldn't solve the problem. Connie did not want to leave Freelancer, not yet. She wanted to fix it.

And she had taken her first step.

"Is anyone following us?" she asked, because the hallway and her HUD was empty and she felt her nervousness wanting to come out in the shape of words instead of just nonsense or sobs.

"Doesn't look like it," Carolina said, sounding amused and like she thought she was superior to any possible follower, and she started down the hallway.

No one attacked them on the way down. They moved in silence, and quickly, although neither used their special abilities. The sounds of shots from outside grew louder, and although she tried not to think about it Connie found herself worried about Wash.

_You'll do worse to him soon if you betray them._

_Maybe he'll come with me._

Almost as soon as she stepped out the door, a motorcycle roared by in front of it. An Innie with an assault rifle was riding one-handed, not firing yet, trying to find North and South. Wash was crouched by a hillock, trying to make himself as small as possible while the square shoulder plates of his armor hunched over him, trying to get a bead on the rider.

"Time to go," Carolina said, and Wash uncurled and walked backward into step with them.

 _Nothing I can do now_ , Connie thought. _We're going and I can't talk to anyone. Maybe I can backtrace the data and get a line in. Maybe they'll change it all once they know this is gone._

Maybe if she went after the motorcycle.

On foot?

As if on cue, the rider spun the bike around, kicking up dirt and digging a new rut at the corner of the building. Connie fired, two short, ineffectual pistol bursts that were more a statement than an actual danger to an armored rider going that fast. Wash was a better shot. One yellow blast from his rifle that she saw out of the corner of her eye and the front wheel of the bike blew with a hiss of escaping air. There was no fire, but the bike bucked end-over-end and shot toward the smaller of the two buildings as if to hide behind it.

Carolina threw a grenade that Connie hadn't known she had. The bike really exploded now, tossing the rider and making him look thin and limp like a doll. The bike crashed into the side of the smaller building with a splintering sound, leaving the rider on the ground.

It was beautiful, really, the way the Freelancers all worked together in a row, first Connie, then Wash, then Carolina adding their own movement to the fray. It would have looked nice in a movie. It would be captioned 'the last synchronized move Project Freelancer ever made'.

More shots came from inside the building. Someone had survived Connie and Carolina's visit, or else the Innie force hadn't been as small as they had thought. North walked out from behind a knoll and South appeared from who-knows-where, maybe behind a building. Connie didn't know, but now they were all arrayed together, and Connie couldn't escape to go see if the rider, now her closest chance at communication, was still alive -

But the five of them standing close together provided an easy target for the people inside the building. Clods of dirt flew and became clouds of dust. The Freelancers could easily track one another through their HUDs, but Connie started inching toward the fallen motorcycle rider, feeling the skin prickling her back. Like when she'd gone outside at home to see what the dog was barking at (an owl, a fox, a ghost perhaps) and turned her back on the dark to get to the door and felt the gooseflesh rise on her back when she sensed, with some animal fear, the eyes in the forest.

"Connie, watch out!" It was South yelling, sounding panicked. Connie heard a grenade tick and realized South had thrown it too close to her in an effort to get to the rider. The shots from the building were getting fewer and farther between, desperate staccatos now, as Wash and North fired back. In the dust she saw the rider turn and run into the alley between the two buildings.

Connie threw herself to the side and ended up tripping over her own feet for a few steps just as the grenade blew up the motorcycle and a sizable chunk of the outbuilding's wall. Debris slammed against her helmet and shoulders.

Wash was yelling in her ear: "Connie, Connie!" but resistance was getting heavier again outside and she could hear the engine of the Pelican. 479 had thought it fit to come in and scoop up the Freelancers herself. Someone would come after Connie if they didn't think she had died back here.  
They would come after her anyway. She had the data about the Innie fleet. She was why they had come here.

She needed to make this quick.

The eyes in the dark in her childhood were still watching her back.

She ducked into the alley where the motorcycle had gone down, pausing for a moment at the edge to think about releasing a hologram. It would probably just draw people to the alley instead of leading them away from the building at all, like her disappearance would do.

The motorcycle had arced over the alley when the grenade hit and landed here, but she couldn't hear anyone moving inside the shadows. She switched her DMR for a pistol and moved slowly inside.

The man was on the ground and moving gingerly, taking his time to turn over as if it were a lazy Sunday morning instead of a war zone. The motorcycle had slammed against the wall and fallen to the ground in a twisted, smoking pile: it looked like the man had jumped before the wall had caused him any danger. He lifted his head off the ground when he heard her footsteps, and she saw the light sheen over his rounded helmet. She couldn't tell an expression on it, maybe because it was different from the shapes of the Freelancers' helmets, or because she didn't expect him to be making any expression at all.

He scrabbled for a gun that had been trapped underneath him.

She bit the tab inside her mask that turned her radio channel off. She said, "I'm not going to hurt you."

"Yeah, right you're not. That's why you've got the pistol."

She thought about lowering it, then felt that would be a bad idea. It would give him a chance to pull a gun on her if he was hiding something, and it would show a sign of capitulation too easily.

Already she was thinking in the language of deception, trying to get four steps in front of him, playing conversation like chess, modeled after war.

She said, "I don't think the Freelancer project is doing right."

He sat up, with one hand flat on the floor but still no sign of a gun. Maybe he had lost it in the crash and only thought it was still at his belt or under his dazed body.

He said, "I would be more inclined to believe you if you hadn't been shooting at me a few minutes ago."

She didn't dignify this response with 'what else was I supposed to do' or 'I had to make it look good'. She said, "I could shoot you now."

He stood. He was quite a bit taller than her. "The project has stolen from us, killed our people. They've never apologized to us before."

"I think the director is doing something to the AI. He never tells us our goals."

"The director? I thought it was run by the UNSC, Lord Hood. Maybe the ONI. What's his name?"

Names were important.

If the director had a state, which one would it be?

Big and shouldery and sand-blasted.

Texas.

She said, "Leonard Church."

She said, "I have to go. They'll be looking for me in a minute. Give me your comm code. We need to be able to talk."

No time for motives now. H would have to be quick to trust her.

If she was lying she would have had him in the perfect trap.

Because she was not lying his innocence would save them both.

He gave her his comm code and she gave him hers with not quite the tone a pilot took with an airport and not quite the tone teenagers took on a first date, but something in between.

He said, "My name's Joshua."

She said, "Call me Connie."

(Later, she wouldn't bother to change it. He would change it for her though, making it an endearment, a nickname, everything she wanted Wash to forget about so that she - and he, maybe, maybe in her restless imaginings before she went to sleep - could leave the project behind.)

She said, "It might take me a few days to get around our security. I won't jeopardize the rest of my team."

He stood up, flinched as if expecting her to attack him, and brushed dust off his black pants. "I don't expect them to do the same for you. You're special."

She thought, _you don't know me well enough to know that._

She said, "What kind of code filters do you use?"

He said, "I'll talk to my techs. We'll be careful. If I call in - "

"Don't call in," she said, suddenly horrified that someone might find her. "I'll call you. Then I'll set up secure channels." She would have to get FILSS involved somehow, or, more accurately, bypass her. That would be difficult. Not to mention the Alpha, if he monitored anything outgoing...and if he was alert enough.

"Stay low when we move out," she said, and backed out of the alley.

She couldn't tell Carolina she killed him: he would just show up at the next mission (trying to kill Carolina again, trying to kill Connie's friends again.) She would need to tell Carolina that he escaped and that she couldn't find him, no matter how hard she tried to look in the alleys and around the roofs.

Wash was still yelling in her ear. Maybe he had been for some time. Now she heard him behind her, pushing around the debris from the motorcycle. Idiot. He was waylaid by his dependance on the HUD. If he looked further back he would find her in the shadows of the leaning roof.

She looked at Joshua. "Go!"

He ran.

Connie jogged back to Wash. When he saw her he came forward with a spring in his step. "Thank God." He lowered his head and touched their foreheads together. The armor clunked and she felt her stomach drop, but not unpleasantly. She was done with the first part of her private mission and she had Wash.  
"What happened to you?"

"I was chasing him. He got away."

"Your comm was off."

"They must have some kind of jammer. I think he was the leader."

Lying was like jumping off a cliff. Luckily, something caught her. She wasn't sure what it was.

Wash said, "We've gotta get out of here."

There was just a tiny waver in his voice. He had been scared for both of them. Funny how he showed it and never cared when he got flak for worrying too much.

The chip in her pocket was like a badge of guilt. She had been the most important part of the mission, and how far past the parameters she had gone. "Here. I almost lost this." Carolina would believe that. She handed him the data chip. He closed his hand around it carefully.

When she and Wash got back to the others they were cleaning up, South leaning slightly to the side presumably with a wound Connie had not seen her sustain, North moving a body out of the way of the Pelican's jets for its own dignity's sake. What little kindness in war became. 479 had set down, the other Innies in the building apparently eliminated.

"Did you find him?" Carolina turned and looked over her shoulder from where she had been walking up the ramp, her feet still facing forward, her whole body still straining toward the completion of the mission, her mask glaring at Connie.

"He climbed over the roof," Connie said, keeping her voice level, and it was level, it was working, she was convincingly lying, even if she hadn't added this embellishment for Wash. Don't add too many details, she thought. Make your lies easy to remember. "He got away."

"He got away?" She turned further and Connie saw that she really was livid. Disappointing her still hurt a little.

What would Connie say here? She had the odd sense of acting in a play where she had been cast as herself.

"Yes," she said. "He got away."

"You should have chased him harder," Carolina said, and showed Connie her back. "But we don't have time now. Get that data on board."

Connie huffed. Wash moved past her and waited for her to come to his side. He had his rifle in one hand and the data chip in the other.

She walked with him, comforted by his presence. (Later she would realize every single moment of every day that she had to leave him but for now that didn't even occur to her. She needed nice things to make her day less heavy, and his existence was nice.)

In her seat in the Pelican Connie started at the floor, looked around, and felt that the slight lifting, nauseous feeling of takeoff matched her emotions perfectly.


	9. Chapter 9

They stood in front of the director for debriefing in the same room in which he had first sent them on this mission.

"You found what you were looking for," he said. There was no question. Carolina or 479 had told him on the way back to the ship. They must have.

"Yes sir!" They said in tandem, and Connie placed the data chip on the table. The counselor, standing in the corner quietly like usual, stepped forward and slid the chip over to the director.

It was almost as if the counselor thought the director was too weak to move that far himself.

The director examined the chip as if for microscopic flaws. He didn't meet Connie's eyes or specifically indicate that he was speaking to her when he said, "Good work." Then he looked up, white light sitting on his sunglasses in a severe square. "You are dismissed, agents."

"Excuse me, sir?" said North, leaning over the table and craning his neck at the director, and everyone, including Leonard Church, looked at him.

"Speak," said the director.

North straightened up when he had their attention. "Earlier, you said that Alpha was going to help us out. But he never showed up."

The director's lips curled down the slightest bit at the edges. "Alpha has been having some technical difficulties. He will be available for all his usual tasks when necessary. There is nothing more to add."

South wrinkled her nose in anger. Connie thought she was maybe trying not to sniff in disdain.

Could Connie trust South if she had to tell someone she had opened communication with the enemy?

She didn't need to think about bringing anyone else into her plan yet. She had barely even put it in motion yet.

She went back to the common room with the others. They joked and talked and traded obscure facts and reminded themselves that they were alive. North played music. South played hers in competition. Maine rumbled at them all.

North did not play the song that Connie remembered from her first night in the Mother of Invention, the one about cowboys and silver.

She downloaded the information she needed from the cloud and forwarded it to the counselor and to an address the director had told her to send it to in the initial briefing. She kept an eye on it, as if it was a tiny pinhole tunnel through which she could spy and find more about the man she had chosen as an ally.

Later, she would find out that Joshua was the leader of the group. He hadn't organized it but he lead it. He had been hired to it. He was Charon's Project Manager. They weren't really Insurrectionists, he said. They worked for the Charon Corporation. Maybe some of them knew Insurrectionists. He didn't mind the colonies. He didn't have strong feelings about the war. Except - and here he stopped, laughed, nervous. Insurrectionists. Where had they gotten that idea? She looked at the wall like it had the director's face. Like he would emerge from it like out of a scrying pool. She said, "I don't know," ashamed of her ignorance at the same time as she worked to reverse it. The director had hidden so much.

Joshua would tell her that he usually didn't charge into battle like that but he had seen that his team was being overwhelmed.

She would prop her chin on her hands and look at the screen of her datapad, balancing it on her knees as she sat on her made bed. She had told Carolina that she was talking to Georgia. He didn't want to leave his side of the suite because he had lost his lucky penny. (This was true. She had talked to him earlier about it. He would corroborate her story as long as Carolina didn't look too hard.)

She had just called Joshua. Like she was calling a new friend for the first time, not sure whether the conversation would be awkward.

She had put up a lot more filters and firewalls and counterspies than she usually did with her friends, though.

"So what were you doing out there?" She said.

Joshua said, "I had to protect my team. We weren't there to get killed. We were just doing our job."

"Yeah. A lot of people use that excuse."

"Well, I...you know that's not what I mean."

He had a way of assuming things about people, making them familiar. He probably did it to his troops too, but she didn't know. He made it sound like he knew you well so that you told him things until he actually did. It wasn't a tactic, either. He was just, as far as she could tell, honestly nice. Maybe a little too honest. It wasn't like York, with his ability to make friends. Joshua didn't have the suave. He just had...nice.

* * *

Alpha displayed the information that Connie had found at the Insurrectionists' base in a classroom session a few days later. He seemed to be back to normal, walking and talking the same, shrugging his shoulders. Connie was sitting next to Wash in the far corner of the classroom, half-watching everyone else when she wasn't looking either at Alpha or at Wash's hair.

"Okay, so we've got this data." Alpha projected a blue rendition of a small fleet of starships - three Pelicans, a couple single-person fighters, and a large capitol ship. North whistled.

"That one looks dangerous."

"That's the _Staff of Charon_ ," Alpha said grumpily, as if he didn't approve of the name, and Connie almost flinched when she recognized the name of the company. The AI continued. "Lame name, anyway. But look, it's a capitol ship. It's got some turrets and stuff. No big deal. In fact, they're pretty understaffed for this thing. Probably mostly running it on elbow grease and, I don't know, hate. We have way more fighters."

Connie squinted at the ship. Maybe Joshua lived there. Maybe she would go there one day, find a bunk in a quiet corner.

If she was going to communicate with Joshua, she needed to be sure that no one was watching her or piggybacking on her signals, and that meant that she needed to be monitoring everything that came in or out of the Mother of Invention on sound waves too. She should probably have been doing so before. She needed to know as much as possible. She needed to know everything.

The computer records weren't hidden under very strong firewalls. It was easy enough to trace anything Project Freelancer put online back to its source. The problem was that most of the important documents were being handled by the ship's AI - or weren't being handled at all, if most of the records Connie saw were the whole story.

She wracked her brain for a way to ask FILSS and Alpha without directly asking them, but realized that she was almost clueless about how AI worked. They weren't really - or weren't just - computers. She couldn't get into their code, not when part of it coded for...sentience. Besides, she was sure the director would know anything she said to them - maybe they would tell him.

Instead she did what work she could from her datapad and from the occasional public terminal, always looking over her shoulder, always afraid. The fear sloughed off when she thought of what she was doing as freedom as opposed to slavery, not a child disobeying a teacher.

She was an adult now.

It felt like jumping off a cliff.

Wash would be her parachute if she just let him, but she couldn't tell him anything. She couldn't tell anyone.

This wasn't about her friends, although she was doing it for them. There was something wrong with Alpha and the director was pitting them against one another for no reason. That was what drove her.

That, and a continued hatred of the board. In training she failed to rise into even the eighth spot. She was getting better with two pistols, hers and Maryland's, but something else was wrong. She found herself tripping, being clumsy, having bad luck or maybe lacking in good luck, and then going back and curling up with her datapad and feeling more comfortable when she was hacking into things. She began to dread when people would call for her, to grow sick at the sound of her own name. She couldn't figure out why the name itself bothered her. There was a strange disconnect between her distaste for the sounds and her distaste for the idea of being caught.

She figured out when South called her name and stretched it out, extending the 'ee' sound into a wheedling whine, like an irate child calling a cat.

Connie. None of the other names ended like that. It sounded like an endearment, and she had no room for endearing words between her and the Freelancers now. They were too dangerous.

It was all about eyes now. Mechanical and natural ones. Eyes and sound waves.

* * *

She was going to change something, so that when they called her she wouldn't have to come any more. And by then, the wires would have taken her name away.

Wash had been sticking by her, occasionally bringing her small things that he thought would comfort her, and this reassured her immensely until she discovered, by more and more careful toe-in-the-water processes of monitoring the data that did and did not pass out of the Mother of Invention, that he was spying on her.

Officially, he was reporting to the Department of Internal Affairs, which seemed to consist of the counselor.

The thought of Wash talking alone with that man, about her, made her feel unclean.

On one of the outgoing transmissions she found out that Wash had been meeting with the counselor more and more often lately. He had been worried about her. He had also been telling the counselor that she stayed alone a lot, that she brought in equipment when she could borrow it from techs, that someone in requisitions had told a pilot who had told a tech who had told York that Connie was looking for something.

She had to leave soon.

She still had some reasons to stay.

* * *

"You haven't been acting the same lately," Wash said, one night when they sat on the couch with their palms pressed together and their fingers interlaced.

"We're so competitive now."

"You mean because of the board?"

She nodded, blinked her eyes. "I feel like it shouldn't have drawn such a line between us. The military is always competitive, but when you climb the ranks there's a sense that anybody can get there. This...it's like a dog show. He's trying to find out who's best of breed."

"You think the director did it on purpose?"

"In what other way would he do it? He runs this problem." She had to stop, take a breath, realize that he did not know she had been investigating the Oversight Committee, or anything else.

She was becoming very good at keeping secrets, and to her own surprise this meant that she did not have to tell any less truths than before.

Wash hesitated. He practically stuttered. "He...I...I don't think of it like that."

She said, "I know," and tried to meet his eyes for a moment, but he looked up, into the corner of the room, and he was colder to her then.

That didn't last long. He still brought her things.

She started to notice things she hated about him, came up with excuses for why his body wasn't perfect. Too pale, too skinny.

He didn't know she was trying to push him away with these standards he didn't know she was chosen, but, well, that paranoid mix of judgement and ignorance was pretty much the same relationship Connie had with the director.

* * *

It was like she had Stockholm Syndrome for the whole project, loving her captors tenderly. The word sounded right: Stock-holm, those hard letters colliding in the middle, forcing the voice to hitch like a car on cracked asphalt. Stock-holm. Gnawing letters buried in innocuous sounds, the bump there in the middle all the time but forgettable if you remembered the more familiar syllables around it. And that last one, almost home.

She wondered whether Wash would go with her if/when she left the project. She asked him once as she was passing by. He was sitting on the floor reading a book. Or maybe not: she craned her neck and saw it was a map. He was just flipping through the maps.

She said, "Do you ever think about quitting?"

He looked up. "Hnuh?"

She stopped and looked at the wall not quite behind him. The one by the side of the bookcase that York had dragged in from somewhere. York brought most of the things. He didn't seem worried about not being able to take them when he left. "Quitting," she said. "The army, Wash. Going home."

"We have to serve our four years." Funny how he sounded knowing and resigned all at once, meaning everything and nothing, reigning himself in. He could have been a terror on her side but she couldn't trust him.

She sighed and sat down, suddenly very tired and very much not thinking about what she had been doing. ("It's nothing something I've done," he said. A line from a children's book. It had been floating through her head a lot because the next line, filled with guilt and winter-cold and fear, was, "It's something I am doing." She was familiar with that feeling of committing a crime at the same feeling as being overwhelmed with guilt for the committing of that crime.)

He reached out and rubbed her arm, and she put her hand over his and moved over to lean her head against his shoulder. She looked over into the shadows on his lap and saw the map opened to her state. Connecticut. Displayed big enough to see all of the little towns, not just the capitol, the whole name was written out across the state in block letters. If it had been smaller, like it usually was, it would have been reduced to initials. C.T.

Maybe she should go by C.T.. It was a lot less childish than Connie.

They looked at the map in silence, but it was nice to feel a stripe of heat next to her where his side pressed against hers.

* * *

And then there was the next mission. It wasn't against the Insurrectionists, and she was glad for that. She wasn't sure who they were fighting. The director had just told them to go and they went, with Carolina at the head of their column like pennant and general all at once, onto a cracked landscape where fans whirred. It was a new factory, everything white and silver and gold, beautiful and dangerous. No one had decided to put in railings or to enforce rules and safety shields or signs.

Flush them out, the director had said. Go find out what they're up to. Odd formality for him, but later Connie found out that the raid was on one of his old friends, more a show of power than anything really useful, and that drove her over the edge. He could not just use an army to intimidate his college rivals, even if he had gone to a college where you learned how to lead people in the most sinister manners and to program trash-talking AI.

It nearly literally drove her over the edge as the group walked along a wide, shining catwalk. It was a small group, four of them: Carolina, North Wash, Connie, with York and South waiting outside on the lawn of the mansion next to the factory, not far from 479 and her Pelican. York kept talking into their mics, never telling them directions or anything useful, but just asking questions. "How's it going? What's it look like in there? Do you see anybody? Do they have a fridge? We need a fridge. Like, a little one. A mini one. Right, Carolina?"

"Shut up, York."

"Yes, ma'am," York said in Connie's earpiece, although of course he was talking so that all of them could hear, and really referring to Carolina. Connie realized that she had almost been drifting off. The factory was empty. It was after hours, the middle of the night, and although the workers had gone home the electricity was still on, lighting the place like a football stadium. Connie thought it was a waste of electricity.

(She didn't quite think of herself as Connie any more. She didn't know what to call herself. Even as a child she had gone through periods where she didn't refer to herself, in her head, by her real name. Sometimes she used nicknames. Sometimes she found a blank space and prodded at it like at a loose tooth, until it gave and bled and the aching, tender new name was there.)

She had been looking at her feet. Below were silver and gold stacks of machinery: gears and crushing, chomping shapes like mouths and printing presses. There were no guards here. There wouldn't be. It was a factory that made disks. The disks were blank, of course, so she couldn't get any use out of them unless they found used ones inside the house. The owner of the factory was certainly rich. If he was friends with the director, or had been once, than maybe Leonard Church was rich too, or had been once, and he was hoarding his money away (or spending it on his Mother of Invention and his Freelancers' power armor) because the war was more important to him than his money.

Lost in her thoughts, Connie toed the edge, and North's voice blared into her attention as she widened her eyes and flinched from her shoulders to her hips.

"Be careful," North said. "You'll hurt yourself."

"I'm fine," she said, and looked straight ahead.

"You're distracted, Connie," said York, and she sniffed. How could he tell? He was too far away.

"What do you know, York?"

"Whoa now, don't get touchy. I just noticed. You've been out of it lately. I'm worried about you, Connie."

People just made noises. Connie sniffed again, Wash drew in a breath like he had clenched his teeth. North and Carolina sighed. They were like a wolf pack, but still trying to figure out the dynamics of who was the alpha male. Connie could read so many little problems in the ways they breathed.

"Focus," said Carolina, and everyone's heads snapped to the front. She was the alpha for now. "I mean everybody."

York said, "Yes ma'am," quietly.

South said, "It's still all clear out here," like she was reminding Carolina that she was still doing her job.

"Remember why you're here," Carolina said.

It didn't matter why they were there. Memory was not the key, and Connie could barely remember the purpose of the mission later. It didn't matter. Carolina had taken care of it, had accomplished the mission as easily as a cat clawing down on a mouse. Everything fell into place when Carolina told it to.

What mattered was that in the next moment, red lines of sniper sights lit up the entire building. five snipers at least maybe more, and two smoke grenades. Connie saw them arc for one terrible moment, silent but for the creaking and clicking of armor as the Freelancers around her looked up. Everything was obscured except a few moving figures she could see, closing in.

"I see one!" Connie yelled.

"Where?" That was Carolina, voice cracking. Connie could barely see the muzzle of her gun tracking this way and that through the reddish smoke.

"Right there!" Connie pointed when she saw a human figure again again, just a flash of a shape, and Carolina turned to see it.

Two red tracer lines swung around and converged. Two tiny snake-bite dots on Carolina's back, on the black part between her armored shoulder blades.

Carolina was shot in the back, twice. Neither round hit her skin. They took her shield down but she wasn't hurt.

Connie could have sworn she had seen right. There had been a man, right there, in murky gray armor.

Carolina yelled, "What are you doing?"

Connie's shame sank into her.

"I'm sorry" caught in her throat.

She helped fight her way out. North and Wash tried to do what they needed to do, destroying parts of the factory, leaving Leonard Church's old friend without some of the source of his fortune, but there were too many guards. The Freelancers had walked right into their trap.

Connie stayed down for the rest of the mission. She liked to have someone in front of her. She had to survive this or else the Insurrectionists would lose their inside man. There wasn't an option where she could describe the mission in terms better than 'at least I survived'.

Her mistake bothered he because information was the only thing she was good at, and she wasn't even good at that. Not good enough. Not good enough to rely on, so she couldn't rely on herself. She was unstable ground.

When 479 brought them back to the ship she didn't bother to stop by the techs to take off her armor. she knew from experience that no one would care if she wore it around. She went to the locker room to be somewhere alone, everyone else all talking among themselves in an informal debriefing just as psychologically important as the official one they would surely have later. (The director would bring her mistake up again. She would have to wait, fifteen or twenty minutes or an hour, knowing that was coming.)

She just hadn't seen. She hadn't known what was coming. She had nearly gotten Carolina killed, chasing a shadow, not knowing there were more guards coming from the other side.

You couldn't punish someone for what they didn't know.

Yes you can, said the world. It happens all the time.

There was even a leader board in here, the blue light falling all over the floor. She could see it even covering the brown armor on her arms, erasing herself, burying her skin.

Maybe if she sat in the light long enough she would become one with the board. Maybe her name would show up. She swung one leg over the bench nearest the board for a moment and slumped there, embracing the bench, her forearms flat. Then she swung the other leg over and sat with a little more dignity, still hunched, staring at the floor between her feet. She had a powerful urge to call Joshua and tell him what had happened - not even because she thought it would effect her work with him, but just to tell him how it had gone. At the same time, that urge was at war with the desire just to sit here, forever, and sink into the ground.

Blue light.

It was all the fault of that board. All the fault of the director. Carolina was obsessed and the director was obsessed and only Connie, little Connie, could see it, but no one listened to her.

When Wash came up behind her she heard him before she cared to turn around and see whose footfalls they were. Wash, number six on the board. She would have been staring at his name if she'd been paying any attention to what was in front of her.

"It wasn't your fault, Connie."

She could feel her face contort, wrinkling, skin pulling toward the bridge of her nose. She was ugly when she was angry. And his name was right there in blue. "Easy for you to say. You didn't drop the ball."

She could picture him shrugging, turning his head, trying to shrug it off for her. "The ball got dropped. We were all there, it was everyone's responsibility."

"Dammit, why are you doing that?"

Even more shrugging. "What am I doing?"

"Making excuses for me. I'm not making excuses for myself. Why are you."

"I'm trying to make you feel better." He stepped closer.

She needed to lash out because if she didn't she would cry and let him hold her and she would never be able to go on with her mission that day and talk to Joshua. Too much progress would be lost. "Yeah? Great. Why don't you make Carolina feel better? Go pat Maine on the head. See how that works out for you."

"We all make mistakes."

"No. We don't. That's the point. We don't all make mistakes. Some of us very specifically make mistakes, and others don't seem to make any, mistakes at all." She thought that he should know better than to say otherwise. She had obviously never kept up with the others. Saying otherwise was just lying, and both of them liked facts.

Soon after she drove Wash away from her, turned her back, denied herself his help and told him he was a fool. He kept trying. He pressed his hand against her shoulder, strong, dipping beneath the severe square upper edge of the plating to find her shoulder without having to think about it.

She told him to call her C.T. and he didn't say no. He tried to turn the argument back to compassion, to keep trying to help her instead of fighting - stop being so hard on yourself, he said, and he didn't understand that it didn't matter if she did that if the program kept being hard on them all anyway. She wondered what he was thinking in his silence as she walked away. She needed to grow up and cast off childish things and be hard and angled like her mask.

That night she asked Joshua what his end goal was. "What do you want to do to the director?"

Joshua wasn't wearing his mask. C.T., newly possessed of the solid shape of her name, sat in the supply closet across from the common room, wearing headphones so his voice wouldn't carry and pitching hers low. She knew there were no security cameras in here.

"We want to find out what the director's doing," Joshua said, as if he thought C.T. hadn't known that that was the plan all ready. "He keeps stealing things. Weird things, too - cryogenics equipment, this...we had some stuff that nobody in the army has. Sebial thinks he wants that."

Connie remembered just then that Wash still had her helmet. He hadn't talked to her since she left him.

"Who's Sebial?"

"Rhee Sebial, he's our security manager. He hired me."

"Oh."

"Are you okay, Connie? You look...distracted."

"It doesn't matter. I'm tired."

"I think it matters."

The first thing she thought to say was Why? Instead, she just stared him down.

He looked down, into the corner of the screen at some floor she couldn't see, and she thought it was much like the pose she had been holding all day.

She brought the discussion back to their mission. "What should I do next? I feel like there's got to be more."

"Have you gotten closer to Alpha?"

"Closer? All I can do is talk to him."

"Find out how he works. He's got to be housed in a computer somewhere." Joshua sounded absolutely certain. C.T. wasn't sure how much he actually knew about how AI worked.

"If I poke around, he'll know."

"Are you sure? Maybe he won't. You're our inside man, Connie. I know you can figure this out."

He sounded trusting instead of demanding. And he was still using that name. She wondered if she should ask him to change it, but it didn't really matter. He wasn't the one treating her like a kid. (Neither was Wash, but Wash could be a stand-in for the entire Freelancer experiment.)

She said, "Don't you have anything? Some kind of lead for me?"

"I don't know, Connie, I'm not there."

She felt the weight of the responsibility fall on her. In the books it always aimed for the shoulders but hers were too small: she felt the weight fall all across her chest and back. She had thought the Insurrectionists were going to be able to help her, but they weren't really Insurrectionists at all - more like mall cops for a company, and they thought she could help them.

She wanted to disappear, to never have influenced anyone, but that was both impossible and would have been a disgusting dereliction of duty. She had chosen to take on the job of finding out the director's secrets. She had to do it.

"Okay," she said to Joshua, glaring into his eyes, giving him the same determined face she gave everyone else. The one that deepened the furrows around her mouth. "I'll do it."

"I knew I could count on you."

After that they said good night and she thought that was an odd way to end the transition. Good night was an intimate thing. It was a thing that friends did.

She thought about going back to her room. Most of the other Freelancers were asleep. Instead she gravitated toward Wash's room and found him lying awake, staring at the ceiling, blue eyes flat and bright. When he sat up and reached for her with his lips parted and his eyes questioning she tumbled into the bed and let him turn her over so that his arms were around her shoulders and her back and hips pressed against the wall on the far side of the bed, comfortably confined. He kissed the top of her head quietly but desperately, as if she had been gone a long time.

She whispered, "I know you're watching me."

To his credit he didn't pretend, didn't feed her a line like _of course I'm watching you_ and look her in the eye. He hardly even stiffened.

He said, "Why do you you need to be watched?"

She ran her fingers through his hair and shushed him and he seemed content with that.

The next day, Agent Texas.


	10. Chapter 10

Of all the things that C.T. had investigated, she had never wondered about the state names that didn't have Freelancers attached to them. She cursed herself for that afterward, but she couldn't show it. Texas was a new person, a stranger, a variable. C.T. hadn't heard anything about it on the outgoing channels, and when the word started going around that a new agent was going up against three of her group in the training arena, she took the risk of just asking FILSS about it to her nonexistent face.

"Oh," said FILSS, as C.T. stood looking down at one of her consoles in a long empty hall, "that's Agent Texas."

"Is she new here?"

"Oh, yes." FILSS was almost as enthusiastic as Florida. "She's very capable. You should go see."

C.T. said, "I think I will."

By the time she found the others, the match was already in progress. C.T. walked quietly into the viewing room. Carolina noticed her immediately, then turned away. Wash and South were leaning on the lip of the large window, South balancing one foot on the toe of her armor and Wash's shoulders canted. The director wasn't in the room. C.T. was sure he was watching from somewhere. North looked at her from the far left as she entered, and for a moment she loitered, caught between the four of them and the battle down below. She saw someone swung into the air and stuck to the wall twelve feet off the ground with paint bullets.

It was just as she approached the lip of the room, planning to lurk behind Wash's shoulder (still a place she perceived as safe), when Wash jerked back from the window and she saw down below that bullets were tearing through the faux stone columns that C.T. had fought over and around so many times. Wyoming and Maine were running toward Tex. She was the big black one - she must be, even though it was hard to tell her gender from the shape of her suit.

"What?" Wash yelled. "Are they using live rounds on the training floor?"

Her heart sank, then hitched up against the bottom. This wasn't a surprise. Of course the director didn't care whether they lived. "Looks like it."

It was just a fact. He should be able to understand it.

"That's against protocol. They're going to kill her!"

"Probably."

"Someone should get the director." Wash said this like it was also irrefutable fact.

"The director?" C.T. replied. "Who do you think gave them the ammo?"

"Watch your mouth, C.T.," Carolina snapped, and C.T. looked back at the window, her cheeks heating with embarrassment and anger.

And then when they all saw the grenade roll in front of York it was like a slow motion-accident, all breaths held. C.T. could imagine York's eyes widening and his shoulders tensing as he tried to crawl away, knowing what was coming. C.T. flinched with the rest of them when Tex shot him and the grenade went off and then they were all running, down to the training floor in a huddled and then loose and jarring panic. C.T. found herself falling behind. She couldn't do this. She couldn't mourn York when she knew she could have stopped this whole thing weeks ago if she'd known how. It hurt too much.

Instead, she realized that this meant she had been right all along. The training was bad for them, the program was bad for them, and they would all see it now. This was punishment.

Still it was reassuring to see medics cluster around York like flies onto food, so quick that C.T. wasn't sure what paths they had taken to get there from the med center so fast.

"You better check your place on the board, Wash," she said, close enough to his shoulder that she could practically smell him, and she knew he would hate her for it. Not only for the jab - that was not new - but for the insinuation that she didn't care about York.

And she did, a little. She winced at the thought of what he was feeling.

But in the place where she should have been feeling bad for him, should have been shouting and running like the others to her friend's side, she felt only old expectations finally crumbling. She probed her feelings like a wound and found it numb to York in this particular instance. Of course the director's experiment would come to something like this.

When he lined them all up and yelled, C.T. stood at the end of the line trying not to be seen and watched Wash backpedal.

When he dismissed them, she was the first one to start to leave. She could still see the medics up ahead, carrying York away.

Carolina started to follow Wash when he left the room, but she hesitated beside Connie, probably wondering whether the director would need to talk to her about anything else. She was wondering about Tex too. Connie saw that Carolina looked over at her as Tex refused the medics' help.

It was certainly possible for Wash to hate. It was hard to get him to do something about it.

C.T. felt weighty again as the medics took York away. His cracked armor dropped golden shards on the floor. When Wash followed them as close as he could get to the surgical rooms, asking if there was anything else he could do and generally getting in the way, she tagged along out of habit and intuition. Pausing a few feet from him, she realized that the medics had taken Texas this way too, but hadn't brought the whirring, clicking body into the med center. Carolina was right that there was something wrong about Texas.

Where would the medics take her, the new person, if she was even human? She whirred.

Wherever it was, it was a place C.T. had never been before.

She looked around, hesitant, and saw a door propped open. Whirring like Tex, it tried to slide closed, but a medic's had rolled between the door and a jam. C.T. turned on her heel and dashed the few feet to the door. Inside she saw just another hall, dark and lit with small red diodes. She kicked the helmet aside and held the protesting door open for a moment.

She heard Wash sigh, wanting someone to talk to, but she didn't look back.

When she stepped fully into the dark hall she heard the door sigh closed behind her.

She saw medics pushing a gurney in front of her. They weren't taking Tex to the medical center. She followed a few steps behind, trying to walk casually and dearly wishing that she had gotten Maine's augmentation instead of the hologram. Invisibility would be nice. Being doubly visible was useless, practically a nightmare in this tiaution.

There was only one door off the hall, this one leading into a room so brightly lit that a while stripe fell out of the door. There was another door at the end, though, and this one opened for C.T.. She thought about the medics and how she didn't know how she was going to get out. The medics with their UNSC implants were green dots on the far right side of her HUD, and no other life signs were showing up. She stepped through the last door.

It was a small room. She immediately saw the camera in the corner, a little round eye, and shied away. Stupid. She shouldn't have charged in like this without a look at the wiring or the plan of the ship. She felt cold.

But she had been doing enough work that she could tell what the camera could see and what it did not. She moved back by the door.

The room had a desk and a computer, and nothing else. A disk was sticking out of the computer like a tiny, viral growth. It didn't look like the room was cleaned as often as others were: dust fogged the corners.

She needed to either access that disk or access the computer manually.

Seconds ticked by and she didn't know how to do it. Maybe it would be possible to get in through her datapad if she could track where the wires went.

Instead, she pulled out the knife kept in her armor for emergencies. It doubled as a weapon but was really a holdover, a practicality in case a soldier needed to cut wire or drain a wound.

She balanced the knife and threw it at the camera.

She would have had to be Wash to hit it straight: instead the knife jarred the camera and bounced, but that was enough to break something in the turning mechanism and snap the camera to the side like a broken limb.

CT eased into the room and pushed the disk into the computer. A moment later, she followed it with a connection to her datapad.

She snapped up the few files she was able to access and backtraced the file names of the others, copying entire folders without looking at their contents. Spiriting the data away was almost the easy part. Almost. The fact that there were no passwords or data trapped behind firewalls frightened her. He couldn't have just thought that no one would look.

Or maybe he could.

Either way, she just needed to get out of here. The room, the low, close walls, were making her skin prickle.

She thought of the medics in the next room, whatever processes they were doing to Tex, and the ones surely doing something different to York She thought that he would live. When his helmet cracked she could see blood dripping over his shoulder, but surely -

surely-

maybe not.

The data finished its download and CT returned to her intense, terrible feeling of not knowing how to get out of there.

She looked back and forth between the door to the room with the terminal and the little door to medical, still open. Maybe there was a second, sealed door beyond there - she didn't know. Lack of information was going to kill her. She had to stay out of the medics' sight, and she couldn't do that from anywhere on the ground. She would have to be above the door.

The download on the screen glowed complete. CT drew in a breath. She could do this.

She engaged her magnet boots, and immediately felt as heavy as if she were kicking through wet sand. This would not be easy. She felt dizzy already, and hunched.

She walked up the wall.

It hurt. Hanging upside-down the blood rushed to her head and made her mind feel fuzzy and gray. When she got to the lip of the door to medical she was too tall; they would see her head and shoulders passing the door. She grabbed at her ankles and succeeded in reaching up to handholds on her own body. Her back ached, and she knew she never would have been able to do this without the powered armor, which was able to hold, though some science she did not understand, its own weight and more.

She dropped to the ground on the other side of the door. Her boots and then her hands made a terrific clang on the floor, but she straightened up fast and no one looked out the door. If she had she would have said she was mourning. She powered back toward her bedroom, shut the door, then retreated to the hall closet instead. The bedroom was too risky. Everywhere was too risky.

She opened the information on her datapad and lost track of time.

It was so easy to find the things that would later become the center of her universe. Part of her remained calm. It would take time, hours and days, for the shock to set in. The realizations. But for now:

She scrolled through the names and descriptions of the AI that had been split from the Alpha. One, Beta, required a second set of hacking skills, and when she got in she saw a video of a woman, looping, telling Leonard to let her go.

The rest of the AI were easier to access.

Then she found the director's notes, curt, sharp dictations about how he could split the AI off not just in theory but in practice, and how the key was that Gamma could lie to Alpha.

"I will fragment the Alpha using its memories," he wrote, calm and controlled, giving no hint of what she would find out, such a short time later, that he was mirroring his own pain.

CT wanted to talk this out with someone wanted to explain. But who could she talk to? She felt lonely and distanced, trapped behind a door she had closed on herself. Except - Joshua. She could only talk to him. But there wasn't time now. There would be a debriefing. She would have to go back into the spotlight, not retreat into the hall closet.

She would have to stay silent.

Not speaking of something as insidious as this felt as bad as lying about it.

The director lied to all of them. He concealed, he manipulated, he had plans and charts to prove how he wanted strangers' lives to go, and he expected his plan to work. Of course believing in his own success was not a crime, but pulling people from all over the world, all over the galaxy and roping them into his scheme before they saw what was coming - that was his crime.

There was no reason not to betray a criminal like that, and besides, C.T. was left feeling like she was the one being betrayed.

The more she thought about it the more she realized that she had cared what the director thought of her. He had been aloof, but in that way he had been the perfect officer. Now it was as if he had left his troops in hostile territory, depriving them both of safety and of the image of him that they had formed. They head feared and respected him. Now that she thought about it she had known nothing about his home life, although the accent had suggested it. Now, with his family laid out in front of her on the screens she looked at over and over in her mind, she realized how little he had been telling them all. Any process that had been going on in his mind had not been intended to further the war, to save humanity, or to make the people he recruited better soldiers who were less likely to die in that war.

She put the story together slowly: that he had loved Allison, and lost her, and turned her into Beta.

It had all been for himself, all an attempt to bring his Allison back. Just for this. Just for a half-imagined love. (Half imagined, because she was dead and gone and could not love him back no matter what he built.)

He's trying to built these robots, C.T. thought as she sat on her bed and stared at the floor, wondering if someone would come get her. The horror and revulsion and betrayal sank to the bottom of her stomach and sat there, acidic and sick.

He is selfish and thoughtless and arrogant, she thought, and the words keep running over and over in her head. She hadn't seen this coming. She had trusted, and everyone had done what he had said, even strong Carolina, and Wash had trusted.

Wash.

He would never believe this.

He would not, in the same way that the average human being did not believe in the Sasquatch, believe this.

C.T. ran her hands over the data pad and glanced down at it. She had to put this away now, keep it, look at it later when she had more time instead of just one condensed moment that she had stumbled into and somehow escaped. (Maybe she would forget this later. Maybe she would go to sleep and in the morning she wouldn't care anymore, or it would have been a dream. Maybe even wishing for those possibilities was criminal, because in front of her in English and Greek and the face of this woman Allison, she held the truth.)

She could worry about Wash later.

Sick. She still just felt sick.

Maybe one of the others could help. South. Would she tell? Would she be too loud? Carolina would tell. She looked up to the director, saw in him something that she did not have herself and which was why she fought so hard. There were also the occasional hints that she had met the director before. None of that, C.T. noticed, was referenced in this data.

Sick. Everything dizzy and heightened, both pain and pleasure infinitely possible. She scrolled through a few more pages without seeing them, then closed the file, feeling the skin around her spine prickle as if she could sense unseen eyes behind her. (When she was a child, she had been afraid to turn her back on the night, but the stars had been beautiful.)

Wyoming and Florida were out of the question: she didn't know enough about them personally to know whether they could be trusted. Would York or North work?

She slipped the data stick out of its port and held it in her palm. She patted her leg with her hand closed around the data stick, regretting that her armor would need to be returned to Processing. Would hiding the data stick work? She would be caught. Luck would not favor her again.

What about York or North? She felt like they wouldn't believe her either. They would take it lightly, and they might spread it around to the others, and that was the last thing she wanted. She liked them, but they were a risk.

Maine..she wasn't even sure he would understand.

That didn't leave anyone.

That left her alone.

She trapped her secret, and with it inside her her sickness abated. She could still feel it, less acidic and sharper now. She felt her heart beating loudly and took deep breaths, trying to control it. She would have to act like nothing was going on when she returned to the others. She would have to look normal, like she had discovered nothing.

She would have to live on this ship, while the director did whatever he was doing to the Alpha.

She didn't care much for the Alpha, not yet, but she knew she had to find out more. If the A.I. was more than human - even as human as FILSS...it made C.T.'s stomach turn.

And this also meant that the board didn't matter.

Being number one didn't matter.

C.T. knew more than Carolina.

C.T. had won.

Suddenly, her field of vision was filled up with a purple t-shirt. She shied backwards, only to look up and find South doing the same. The other woman blinked at her. "Hey."

"Hey," said C.T..

"Get out of here," South said. "We've been looking for you. We've got debriefing." South looked around the room. "What are you doing here, anyway?"

"I was worried about York," C.T. said, giving the first answer that didn't convict her and tightening her hand around the data stick pressed against her leg.

South's expression twisted, but there was pity somewhere there, like South thought that what C.T. wasn't saying was that she had been shaken by the accident.

"That Texas is bad news," South said, turning to go. "Hurry up."

C.T. said, "Okay."

She took a deep breath and watched the other woman go.

The speed with which her breath and heart grew quiet surprised her, and again there was that feeling of being on top of a precipice. She could feel the emotions and revelations and drawn conclusions somewhere around and below her, but she hadn't fallen into them yet.

She couldn't hide the data chip under her pillow and expect that to work. She hadn't touched her duffel bag in months. That might work, but just tossing the chip in the bottom seemed like a recipe for disaster. Of course as soon as she hid it someone would need to look in the bag for some unknowable reason. (Wash would look. What would Wash think?)

C.T. went down on her knees by the side of the bed and pulled out the bag. The inside was dirtier than she remembered, speckled with dust. She reached inside, scraped at the dust with the nails, and found her UNSC dog tags.

She picked them up with an odd sense of history. She'd nearly forgotten about them, nearly forgotten that there was a normal army out there. Maybe she could go to someone out there to help, to find out what the director was doing. There was no question that it wasn't on the level. But even the fact that she hadn't been thinking about the army was a sign that the director had tried to separate them from it. She didn't know how, but he had kept all of this secret. He had distracted them with the board and the mission, this grand mission against monstrous enemies, dazzled them with the grand technology of Alpha and FILSS and their armor. (He had dazzled them with each other, sometimes. She wondered if he knew about Carolina and York. She wondered if he cared.)

She could hide the chip here, between the metal plates. It would require some tools. She'd need to get them from one of the workshops on the ship, where-ever they were, because she had nowhere else to go. The only other people the Freelancers had contact with were their monstrous enemies.

If the director was doing wrong, maybe his enemies were doing right. She had already gotten in contact with Joshua, and she was sure that she needed him now. She could go to the Insurrection.

If the director was watching out for his soldiers to remember what they signed up for, she could go only to the Insurrection.

But how would that be less obvious than going to the UNSC?

She dropped the chip next to her tags and zipped the bag. No one would notice it was zipped, right? She pushed it back as far under the beg as it would go and sat down in front of it, further crumpling the fabric.

She sighed a few times, deep, almost sobs of relief.

* * *

After her next class she stayed, looking at the part of the floor where the blue hologram had stood. She couldn't have said why. Maybe to look at the triad pattern on the floor, or to see how close she could get to being director watched her as she hesitated at the top of the sloped walkway.

"Do you have any additional questions, Agent Connecticut?"

She tried to look into his eyes, regardless of the dark glasses getting into the way.

She thought, His name isn't Alpha. It's the Alpha.

It was the simple things that revealed how much people never knew.

She said, "No, sir."

In the end she went to bed without speaking to Joshua, still not sure what she would say.


	11. Chapter 11

CT did not get caught. This fact fascinated her even as she poked at it with something like revulsion. Had she really covered all her tracks? It seemed more likely sometimes that the director was playing with her. But she encoded and compacted and triple-checked, and she did not get caught.

She resolved to do as much as she could with the time she had. She needed to find out what had been done, or was going to be done, to the Alpha.

With the director continuing to not catch her she became more bold, lurking around the classroom more often when Alpha was present. One day when the counselor had left and she was about to slip inside, it was Wash who caught her.

"Are you coming?" He said as the others left behind him, his helmet bobbing, and she thought about whether she should make an excuse. She could say she had forgotten something, but he wouldn't believe her.

She said, "No," as she entered the lecture room, expecting her cold shoulder to drive him away. He had sounded so mewling. It did not.

He followed her down the aisle between the desks. She began to feel hunted, there in the slightly sloping room, but she could at least tell part of the truth here.

"You don't have to come with me," she said, reaching the end of the aisle and looking at him.

He said, "I know."

(Later she would see this stubborn loyalty as a distorted version of the familial admiration he had for the director.)

She said, "I think something might be wrong with the Alpha."

She could hear his armor creak as Wash shrugged. "You always think something's wrong."

"Wash, I'm not some kind of...AI hypochondriac. He's acting funny. I have a bad feeling about this." And that was all she had. She didn't know whether the data contained plans for things that hadn't happened yet or records of things that had.

"He's an AI. How would you even know if something's wrong?"

She didn't know.

Both of them circled Alpha like predators.

CT thought that she should have known something was up as soon as she heard his name. AI were usually given flowery designations like the famous Cortana, names designed to elevate their mechanical beginnings and increase morale. But designating the Mother of Invention's smart AI Alpha implied sequence, a preparation for more letters to follow. It implied an Omega. CT did not pause to berate herself for not considering this earlier.

She said, "Alpha."

The little AI looked around as if he couldn't tell where the Freelancers were, then settled his blind gaze on her. "Yeah, what?"

"How are you doing?" She stopped moving, causing Wash to come to a jerky halt on the other side too.

Alpha said, "What do you mean, how am I doing. I make calculations, I run the ship, I teach you guys. It's not - well, it is rocket science, actually." he muttered.

CT felt suddenly like she wasn't prepared for this, like she didn't have anything to ask under the scrutiny of Wash's eyes, and maybe the director too looking through Alpha's.

"I thought FILSS ran the ship?" Wash asked, giving her time to think.

"Eh, part of it," Alpha said. "She's built in. She does all the...secretarial stuff."

"I heard that," FILSS's disembodied voice said, and CT jumped so hard that it hurt her shoulders, and Wash looked directly at her.

She snapped at Alpha instead of him. "How does the director treat you?"

Alpha made a noncommittal noise. "As well as he treats himself. What is this, some kind of checkup? Want me to stick my tongue out and say 'ahh'? Gonna hit my knee with a comically small hammer?"

CT shrugged. "Okay. I get it." She turned and walked away up the ramp and out of the limelight, with Wash's footsteps following her.

When she paused at the door Wash looked at her with concern. She knew that he could see the fear, frustration, and disappointment in her face. He did not comfort her, and she did not expect him to.

* * *

Later, she looked through the data that she had stolen again and found videos of a blonde woman pushing Leonard Church away. CT watched the video loop a few times, then shut it down and tried to order her thoughts.

She heard footsteps, and looked up past the tiny hydroponic garden she had sat down behind. The spot wasn't exactly hidden but she could pass it off as a place she wanted to go to read quietly. She still had her helmet on, so that she could feed the audio-visual into the suit directly, like a high-tech pair of earphones. If she left no data-residue no one would be the wiser. She took the mask off and set it on the floor beside her as the footsteps got closer, wondering whether she could push both it and the little data chip under the nearest shelf if she had to.

The footsteps stopped.

The person wasn't entering the room, but he might be watching her, so CT put the helmet under her arm and the chip in her pocket and walked into the hall, feeling heavy and dangerous and exposed all at once.

The man in the hallway was Maine. He looked at her blankly before continuing on.

* * *

The Sarcophagus heist went quickly. CT watched both Alpha and the director in the cool blue light of the war room and snapped to attention when he wanted her to. Not long after, she was crouched in the dust behind an overturned cop car with North and Wyoming in front of her. They were supposed to be the distraction, and what bigger distraction than this - North had shouted to shoot the tires and this car was here because CT had done just that, but when an officer had gotten out Wyoming had reeled back like he was going to punch him and shot him through the forehead.

There wasn't time to think about much except when the Pelican would come and how to survive this. Wyoming fell and CT caught him, staggering back and turning her fall into a rough sit behind the car. Wyoming lolled, and she scrabbled to see a hole in his chest armor. The wound was closer to his armpit than his heart. North backed into view moments after, and they held down the macabre fort. CT never saw whether North killed anyone.

On the way back in the Pelican, North asked what was in the Sarcophagus.

York said, "I don't know, man," and Carolina said it didn't matter.

It did, though, and CT kept an eye on it for the rest of the trip. By the time of the debriefing, the diamond-shaped hulk was gone.

By the time she found a quiet corner near Engineering to reroute some wires (blatant, frightening, essential theft) she was trying to order her thoughts and failing. She didn't bother to say hello to Joshua, even when he appeared without his helmet. He had a wide, innocent face but a down-to-earth soldier severity in his eyes, and a black slash of hair.

"I found it. I know. I know everything. I was wrong about some things, but - that's only because I'm not right yet."

"Slow down. Explain, explain."

Joshua was bare-faced today. He seemed to have cut his hair.

"Today he captured the Sarcophagus."

"He - that's the doctor, right?"

"The director. The Sarcophagus is some sort of big...machine, thing. He took it from a Charon building."

"Yeah, we...heard about that."

"They also killed Rhee," said a feminine voice, and a blonde woman pushed into frame. CT winced, reminded of her own brush with Maine. Did Joshua have people watching him while he talked to the enemy too? "Did you hear about that?"

CT wasn't sure she was talking to her. "I, me?"

"They killed him."

"I wasn't there for that."

The woman huffed and stood behind Joshua with her arms folded. She had a lot of hair.

Joshua said, "You can tell her too."

CT said, "You wanted to know what Leonard Church was doing."

"We wanted confirmation, yes."

We want our technology back," the woman said.

"Our bosses do." Joshua seemed to be trying to clarify that he and his bosses were not on the same page. The woman was not either: she was the loyalist, CT thought. She was his Wash. But if Joshua wasn't a loyalist, what was he?

CT said "I can't get you the Sarcophagus back." She knew there was fear in her voice as she thought about what a huge undertaking that would be. "It's too big."

Joshua and the woman glanced at one another. "What did you find?" He said.

"Data." CT settled into the telling. She wasn't interested in the physical things - although if she could possibly get the Sarcophagus away, maybe she could stop the production of the AI.

She fit more pieces of the puzzle together even as she was explaining what she definitely knew. "He's splitting AI. He started out with one that was based on a human brain. His brain. He's trying to use the Sarcophagus to split that one AI apart. He's Alpha, he...works with us."

"The AI's name is Alpha?" Joshua asked.

"Yes."

"And he's using the Engineer..." Joshua said. Again the two Insurrectionists glanced at each other like they weren't telling CT everything.

"The what?" CT asked.

"Nothing," said the woman, but Joshua continued on.

"The Engineer. It's an alien in there."

"A Covenant alien?"

"What other kind is there?" For the first time, Joshua sounded acerbic.

CT didn't care. She was too busy wondering, examining the idea from all angles. How did that work? What did aliens have to do with human AI? Who fed it?

She asked one of those questions. "Why is he using a Covenant alien to make human AI?"

"We don't know," Joshua replied. "But it must be something."

"What were you going to use the Engineer for?"

"We'd just captured it. Were waiting to find out whether the UNSC would buy it."

CT could have gotten stuck on the idea that there was something similar between the AI and the aliens, but she didn't know the science of it. A search for specificity in her own brain came up blank. She had never considered the aliens as factors in any of this. They were far away, striking occasionally at colonies. How in the world had the Insurrectionists- the Charon team - captured one?

"Well look," she said, "The director isn't trying to find anything out about the aliens. He's trying to make more AI, and he's trying to make a person out of them. He's made a woman - his girlfriend, or fiance. He's trying to crack the AI into enough pieces that one of them becomes her."

Joshua looked blank.

"That's not very...scientific," said the blonde woman, and then looked at CT with sharp accusation in her eyes.

"He's already made a few," CT said, figuring that going ahead and ignoring the attempt at an insult was the best thing to do. It made sense for the woman not to be trusting. It didn't make so much sense for her to be hostile.

Joshua was still looking distant and blinking, and CT wondered what he was thinking. What about Church's problem had intrigued him?

She spoke to fill the silence. "I don't like any of it. I want to get out of here. Can you get me off this ship?"

She hadn't realized she was going to propose that so soon. The idea sank into her, painful, and she realized that she had decided some time ago and even hidden it from herself. Dropped the ball again.

Joshua nodded immediately, though, but the woman spoke, not unkindly. "What exactly will you be bringing with you?"

"All the data I have."

"When can you leave?"

CT thought about it. She wasn't ready yet. She had the data but she didn't understand it - and she didn't want to leave. She just couldn't picture it. She made herself meet Joshua's eyes, fidgeting with her hands below the screen's field of vision. "I...need to stay a little longer. I'll send you what I can."

"It'll take time for us to plan how to make the transfer anyway," Joshua said, seemingly stealing the conversation away from the antagonistic woman. "You don't have a ship?"

"Not a private fighter. "

"Maybe we can get your team to come to us. Plant a diversion."

"The director likes to investigate things. Plant some of that alien technology, or something that looks like it."

The woman nodded. "That could work."

"But be careful," CT said. I've got at least two people on my trail."

"Other agents?"

She thought about Maine stomping around the corner. He was in medbay now, undergoing lengthy repairs to his throat. Everyone had gone to visit him. She hadn't yet. The medbay looked too much like a torture chamber, reminded her too much of the doctors or whatever it was that tended Texas, that she had had to sneak past. She said, "Yes."

"Okay. Take your time," Joshua said.

"Or don't," said the woman.

"What's your name?" CT asked.

"It doesn't matter to you yet," the woman said. She stood up and put a thin but not delicate hand on Joshua's shoulder. "Don't take too long...sir," she said. "Keep an eye on the channel."

"I know," Joshua said.

After the woman left CT felt suddenly very alone with him. "I should go," she said. "Keep an eye on...channels."

"No, she -" he almost reached forward. "She's just worried. You don't have to go."

"I'm not sure what else we have to talk about. I'm doing my job. I'll contact you when I'm ready to be extracted."

"I like to get to know the people I'm working with. Her name's Katie, by the way."

"She didn't want you to tell me that."

He shrugged.

She was left with nothing to say and felt like disclosure had suddenly become required: he was conversational and she didn't understand that. "I'm going to go. I'll call you later."

She had her finger over the button when his mouth turned down. She waited a moment in silence and realized that she had been tapping her fingers on her leg for a while now, a nervous beat that she didn't stop. When Joshua didn't reply she broke the signal off, leaving her staring at a frozen image of his face. She switched the screen off.


	12. Chapter 12

North had brought out the video games, the console that he stashed under his bed and usually played alone, and tonight some critical mass had been reached that meant the game was indiscriminately popular. Perhaps they needed it to distract them from Maine's injuries. He was still in medical, occasionally visited by one Freelancer or another. Even Wyoming and South were in the common room, looking over the others' shoulders at York and North holding the controllers. CT had stayed in her room as long as she could but had grown bored, tired of the sophomoric approach of resisting any fun after she had started to hear the scrape of the wheels of Wash's skateboard. So she emerged into the common room, wringing her hands together inside the sleeves of her brown sweatshirt before carefully, consciously moving her hands to her sides. No need to show how nervous she was.

In the common room with nine backs facing her there was no need to show a camaraderie that now felt fake and temporary, though. Wash was separate from the others too, both his movement and his need for space keeping him at the back of the group. He pushed back and forth while South shouted and shoved and Carolina imperiously crossed her arms, wrinkling the sleeves of her blue t-shirt.

CT fell into the habit of lurking.

When she came up behind Wash he stopped without looking at her, just knowing that someone was there by the sound of their footsteps and some shifts in the air. Before he turned around she said, "I see you're working hard for your spot."

Between Wyoming's shoulder and Carolina's head CT saw York look in her direction, but he was too many Freelancers deep and too involved in the game to start protesting her self-made exclusion. Maine grunted.

Wyoming looked back at her and said, "Why so gloomy?"

"Shut up, Reggie," CT said.

Wash fetched up beside her and she turned to him, only to find him bristling but then looking away from her fast, pretending or perhaps really interested in the narrowly visible television screen.

She said, "You're not doing your job, Wash," and turned away.

When he followed, she headed for the door.

In the hallway he tipped his head and looked at her like she'd hit him.

"I don't understand," he said with his skateboard in his hand, rocking loosely a foot from the floor. "We're just trying to relax and have fun?"

Although he was right, the fire had gone out of her now and she didn't want to talk about it, especially when he knew so much about her already. Anything could be a reveal of information. She thought it was meaningful that he had followed her out here though, that her question had intrigued and frightened him.

(Not much later, she would realize that she had also simply been lonely. She had wanted to say goodbye to him. She had wanted to say goodbye to loneliness.)

He sat down on the floor, leaned the skateboard against the wall, and looked at her.

She sat next to him. Tangled her hands in the t-shirt above his ribs and even pressed her knees against him until he caught the back of her leg and pulled her into his lap, the back of her thigh tingling under his palm. She flattened her side against him and pressed her face against his shoulder. A moment later she felt him kiss her hair, then the neural port at the back of her neck, and just stayed there.

He mouthed words against her skin but she didn't know what they were. She said "I love you," anyway, meaning it as the last time, thinking about the way he stalked her in the classroom and how Alpha came between them.

He asked her if she wanted to go somewhere else, feebly. She said, "None of us are afraid enough."

"What?"

"You're complacent."

It was insulting, and he took it as no more than an insult. He drew away from her and looked hard at her, his legs shifting between hers and the floor. "Why are you nasty to me, CT?"

"Why are you tracking me?"

He widened his eyes and looked at her. "Because the Director asked me to," he said. The plainness of his answer disgusted her and she slid away from him, getting her knees under her and standing up, bracing her hand against the wall although his shoulder was nearer.

"It's not my fault, CT," Wash said, standing too but backing toward the common room door as if desperate to return to the blind camaraderie of the team. He left his skateboard on the floor. "You know that."

It's my fault, she thought, but could not feel that as a bad thing in her head. She was doing the right thing.

"You could tell me," he said. "You could tell me, even if it's...you sending those messages, even if it's not."

The fact that he didn't know, that he wasn't sure or would pretend to himself or her that he wasn't sure disoriented and stunned her, but she fell back into her reliable attitude, the same one that had allowed her to ask Wash to check his place on the board as soon as the director had finished speaking to him, and while York was still bleeding on the floor. She said, "What messages, Wash? You just keep doing your job. Do the homework that the director assigned you."

She couldn't storm back to her room like she wanted to, since he was between her and the door. He looked down and she wished that he was wearing his helmet, that she couldn't see the wrinkles in his skin as he frowned and blinked.

She went the other way instead. Her radio and other equipment were still in her room, hidden in plain sight since all of it was legal and standard-issue on the outside. Alone, she walked the halls, feeling like she was being watched although, for once, she was doing nothing worth watching.

When she felt enough time had passed she returned to the common room only long enough to see that the game was still going on and Wash was sitting on the couch, hands in his lap and legs pressed together like he was afraid he would take up too much space, intently watching York's and North's avatars beat each other up on the screen. She wondered whether she would rather have seen him sulking alone or trying without not quite succeeding to have fun and came to no conclusion.

The radio was in her bedside locker; she gathered it up and walked out, walking nonchalantly. She had learned from the UNSC how to look like she wasn't watching someone. It seemed fitting that she used those talents now, since she was so sure that the director was working, if not against the UNSC, not exactly in concert with them.

Inside the greenhouse, she set the radio up and called Joshua.

He wasn't available. Blonde-haired Katie told her so in a clipped voice. CT knew the other woman didn't trust her, but she didn't expect her to: they were on opposite sides, after all. Perhaps the Insurrectionists knew even more about the Mother of Invention than CT did, and she had been accused of crimes she did not know she committed.

That didn't mean she wouldn't snap at Katie too.

"He'll call you later," Katie said, and cut the connection.

CT waited in the dark, going over and over her security protocols in her head. To anyone watching, to anyone investigating, her signal would be invisible. No awkward questions. It would be all right. She put the radio down and looked at the stalks of plants growing around her.

The light went on: the signal had come back. CT looked down at the small screen for a moment like it was a portal she could fall into, and then picked it up.

Joshua was there, helmetless. "What's up?" he said.

"No big updates." She would frame this in business as much as she could, although really she was feeling that with the collapse of the Freelancers' team dynamic she needed another one to rise up in its place. "Our soldier who was injured on the highway is recovering."

"Thanks," he said sarcastically. "The big guy?"

"Yes."

Joshua cursed. "Got any other good news?"

"I'm still investigating."

"Okay. And..."

She looked down. "I just...I think some of the Freelancers know. They don't know what I'm doing but they know it's something."

"I told you, we have to get you out of there."

"Not yet. I don't know enough yet either. I don't know what the Sarcophagus alien is for."

Joshua sighed. "We can guess."

"Tell me."

"I don't know how much it will help. I know what it is, and a little bit about what it does but that doesn't tell you what Church wants it for."

"So what is it?"

He sighed. "An Engineer is an alien that fixes things for the bigger aliens. It's a mechanical genius in a box."

"What do they look like?"

"Jellyfish."

"And it's been kept in that thing all the time? Team A - the other Freelancers treated it pretty rough."

"I noticed. If it's still alive, it's a mechanical genius in a box. If not, it's goo."

"We'd probably be able to tell if a plan of the director's as big as that didn't work out. Combined with the data I found..." She didn't know. Combined with the fact that the director was breaking AI apart, that Tex was one, that the director was using his grief to tear his team apart. ..what did she have? She was tired of getting non-answers to her question to repeated it again, angrily. "I still don't know what they're going to do with the alien."

"You'll find out."

She almost snapped at him; the way he said it was strangely personal and pitying, not the anger she had respected in return for her own. Then she realized that perhaps what she was misunderstanding as presumption was trust. She sat back, scratched at the back of her neck. "I guess."

"It'll be okay. Hey, I meant to ask...where are you from? Earth, or the colonies?"

"Does it matter? You're not really Insurrectionists."

He held up his hands. She could see his blurry fingertips at the bottom of the screen. "Just wondering. Small talk."

She sighed. "Earth. Where are you from? How did you join the...do I even call them the Insurrection?"

He smiled. She felt like she was being mocked. "The Charon group." He told her where he was from.

"Is that a town or a planet?"

She tried to care and found that she couldn't. It was tiring to listen to him talk fondly and at length about the place where had been been.

"You've never been to Earth?" she asked.

"No."

Funny. He seemed so home-grown.

"I want to go back there, really," he said.

"To Earth?"

"To my home town. I don't want to have to keep traveling."

"When's your term up? Does it work like that?"

"Not really. I need the money. And...I like the people here."

 _I like the people here too_ , she started, to say, but didn't. He was opening up to her. It was his turn to give information. She wasn't planning on becoming his best friend, even if he was more emotive than she'd expected. He was awfully soulful for someone with aggressive hair.

She said, "Last time, when I started to talk about the director, you looked distracted. What do you think of it all?"

"Oh, I...I think it's sad. He's willing to go so far for someone that he'll try to resuscitate them?"

"I hadn't thought of it quite like that," she said, because she hadn't. Empathizing with the director was far from her feelings or plans.

Joshua shrugged, and turned the shrug into a stretch where he lifted his arms and rotated his head on his thick neck.

"I've gotta go," CT said, because empty airtime was a waste of space, and dangerous.

"I'll see you later. Let us know when you want to leave."

"I know," she said, and cut the connection.

She hadn't wanted a long goodbye from him, because she felt she might start to like it. She could empathize with his need for secrecy, his uncooperative team.

And in the thick of her talk it had felt for a moment like she was alone, like no one was watching her.

It had felt easy.

* * *

 

Wash did not ignore the fact that she had rebuffed him. He was shy but not without a backbone, and the confrontation came just after she had left the locker room between a quick, light lunch and firearms training.

Joshua had called her again.

The string of numbers on her comm meant that he, or the Charon soldiers as a whole, had something urgent to tell her. She needed to get to a screen. Her own was in her room, though and she only had a few minutes before she needed to report to the training room where the director might be waiting.

CT moved town an out-of-the-way hallway, trying to breathe quietly even as her heart pounded in her ears. She tried to calm herself with the fact that she knew where all the cameras in the ship were, and that there were none here. No overlapping fields, no eyes, no invisible radio waves breaking against the shore of her spine. She was so frightened, though, and the more frightened she became the more sure she was that someone could see that.

In a long stretch of hall that looked deceptively open he skidded to a stop and keyed in his code, knowing that she hadn't put any of her usual protocols in place, knowing that just because this was a different screen made her task many times more dangerous. This hallway seemed incidental to her; she thought that she had only ever seen sim troopers use it. No one would see her. No one would know -

But she was leaving more than usual to chance, because he had called her.

Joshua appeared with his helmet on.

"What do you want?" CT muttered.

"We need you to know how important it is we extract you. People are getting suspicious."

His use of 'we' made CT think that Katie or someone else had talked him into this. She wondered whether the Insurrectionists' internal politics were as messy and sad as the Freelancers'.

 _You called me just for this?_ she wanted to shout, but that would also take up time she didn't have.

"Your people took a lot of our resources, Connie, and we can't afford to lose our informant too."

"I'm trying. I understand. I just need more time -"

She heard footsteps. Idiot, she thought, giving the title indiscriminately to Joshua for thinking he could call her at any time, and herself for picking up, and whoever was walking toward her for existing.

"I have to go." She cut off whatever he had been going to say.

Wash ambled around the corner, looking lost. She thought he might have been looking for her, but when he stopped dead still it didn't matter any more. Whatever he had been looking for, it wasn't here, and maybe he had seen her talking, or had heard Joshua's voice.

"What are you looking at?" she snapped, falling into the scornful tone that came easily to her. She could distract him with that. "Mind your own business."

"I could say the same," he said, quicker and harsher than she expected. For once his reflective visor looked blank, no expression at all on the false face, although he stood the kind of still that meant he might be about to shake.

She walked past him, feeling like her shoulders were going to shake too.

In training he wouldn't look at her. In a room full of gunfire his shots sounded loudest, thunderclaps of sound, punctuating her heartbeat.

She hated him, but it was a hate that paid a lot of attention to the epiphanic blue of his eyes, the imperfections in his skin, the fearful ways he moved. For his sake, Wash was perhaps reassured by the fact that although she snapped at him, she wouldn't leave him alone: outright rejection would have been worse, and he fell into the role of scapegoat easily because he was used to it.

For a while, they enjoyed the novelty of openly, passionately disliking one another.

Like other passions, it faded.


	13. Chapter 13

Carolina won.

The director announced it, at the final selection that Wash had predicted would never happen.

It was early morning, everyone shuffling except Wash who of course still walked like he was in a parade. CT followed him, sleepy eyes easily gravitating to the yellow shoulder plate on his right side and following it instead of looking at the hallway. She was frightened too, thoughts digging at the back of her mind: _If the director is going to reveal me he wouldn't do it in front of everyone. If he's going to interrogate us all I have my answers ready._

She did; her parents could vouch for the fact that she had been in touch with them sometimes but after considering it briefly she had decided that she did not want to involve them, at least not enough that they could be considered complicit, because they were not, and their ignorance compared to the crimes they would be convicted of were so vast and unjust that CT couldn't stand it. They wouldn't work for long as a distraction anyway, especially since the director would have already had to single CT out. Instead she invented ID codes for the people she spoke to. She did not know how to fabricate government records but she could create digital ones that would pass an initial test. She had made people up like storybook characters, writing names and addresses and thinking about occupations and families before discarding them, knowing that she was not here to lose herself in imagination.

She watched her view of the hallway bob up and down with Wash's shoulder.

The director brought them to a classroom that CT had seen used before, but not often - not the same one that Alpha had been in. The ship was not a school, no matter how often it operated like one; there were not many of these lecture rooms, but there were enough for the multiple teams of Freelancers that the director had had at the beginning, and CT wondered whether Georgia or Maryland had sat in this room as she stood in line with the rest of her team at the top of the aisle.

The director raised his right hand. The board glowed to life on one of the screens as if the director had held up a light, also illuminating the counselor lurking near the back of the room. He straightened up from where it looked like had been checking some of the electronics.

The Freelancers looked around at one another. The hair on the back of CT's neck prickled and she had the feeling that the others were feeling the same thing, a team-wide goosefleshing of anticipation. In that moment they all knew, and any eyes that had not been locked on Texas's name at the top of the board from the moment that it had appeared were there now.

The director waited while the Freelancers looked around. "Should we sit?" Wash muttered. It was the sort of thing he usually said, a little bit of nervousness revealing itself, but here with their comm settings on external the director heard it immediately and answered in a strong voice.

"You do as you wish, Agent Washington."

Wash flinched, and CT thought that he was looking at his own number six.

I'm not on there, she thought. _He won't even pay any attention to me._

The director said, "Agent Carolina, step forward."

She didn't have to push through: Freelancers parted for her. CT leaned around the side of Wash's shoulder to watch the shorter woman pace down the aisle, her ponytail swinging. Instead of standing in front of the director with her back to her team she faced him with her side to them, staring evenly at his face.

CT looked around, into the shadows at the back and the side of the classroom, but Texas wasn't there.

"Congratulations, Agent Carolina," the director said evenly. "As one of our top agents, you will be the first to bring us into the next stage of the project."

CT stood still. It was strange to her that none of the others knew what was coming next.

The Director said, "You have had your special abilities for some time now, but no way to run them without power routed from this ship. Now, you will always have that power and that responsibility. Each of you will be assigned, in turn, an artificial intelligence program to augment your armor. Carolina." He inclined his head. "Will be the first."

"Thank you, sir." Carolina saluted, her spine straight, her hand a blade. CT glanced at York and watched him watching Carolina, wondering if York was seeing the same tension that CT was.

"But, sir, wait." She stared straight ahead at him. "Agent Texas is number one on the board. Why doesn't she get it?"

_For the same reason there won't be a Beta,_ CT thought.

"Texas's role has been arranged already," the Director said dismissively. Carolina's eyes narrowed.

The director continued as if he hadn't been interrupted. "Your AI will speak to you, interact with you, enhance you."

Inside his next pause, Carolina said, "Sir. I want Maine to have it."

The director's brow furrowed. "Agent Carolina?"

"Maine can't speak. If he gets implanted with an AI, it will help him to communicate. It'll make him a functioning soldier again."

Maine had been in recovery since the heist. There was talk that he would go home. An Insurrectionist had shot out his throat. It was, people said, a miracle that he was alive.

But Connie was taken aback. Carolina wasn't supposed to be this gracious, this considerate. Surely she was just trying to control the others, trying to form them into the team she had made - but that was a good thing in Carolina's eyes, and it would have been a good thing if they had been fighting for a good cause. CT could not hate that - and she wanted to, she hadn't realized until now how part of her anticipation for this moment had come from how much she wanted to hate Carolina for winning. Because it would have been simple then - a win and a loss, as in part of CT's mind it was. If Carolina had been smug, if she had gloated, that would have been easier.

The director also seemed taken aback, but only for a moment. He didn't show it on his face, or in his hands at his sides. "It is your decision."

"Maine needs it."

The director nodded. "So it shall be."

(Did CT see a smirk, a curve, a twitch of his skin under his graying beard? She wasn't sure.)

Regardless, Carolina descended the aisle.

The director moved closer, more central to the Freelancers: he clasped his hands behind his back while the counselor made notes on a tablet. "The rest of you will be assigned according to the order," the director said, still calm and stentorian.

_What about me?_ CT wanted to ask. _What do you plan for me?_ But she didn't need to, and wouldn't have even if she was planning to stick around that long.

The director told them that he would give Maine the news himself. Other implantations would come over the next few days.

"This is gonna be awesome," York said on the way out. "No one else has this."

CT stared at Wash's shoulder piece and thought, _and none of you wonder why_.

* * *

There was no news of Maine's implantation that day, although they all drifted in and out of the medical suite looking for news. York had gotten to know all the doctors when he was in for his eye, but that didn't help him get any more information than the others. CT watched and listened. Carolina pushed them all to follow their schedules with more than the usual aggressive reliability.

Everyone had been asking her how she felt about giving up the AI - South, mostly, after York learned that she would get quiet and Wyoming that she would snap at him. Wash and CT hung back, both not sure what to do with this change in the status quo.

Carolina and CT had had an uneasy silence between them for months and had not been in the habit of being in their room at the same time: both didn't spend much time there except to sleep, both because they were too busy and CT because she felt that if she stayed in one place too long she would leave too much of a trail. The night after the explanation of the board CT had to try, though. She was curious about Carolina's reaction at the same time as she begrudged it.

She was lying in bed with her blankets pulled up against the cool recycled air. Carolina pulled herself up from where she had done pushups against the floor, her knuckles red and her face flushed.

When Carolina turned back her sheets CT said, "I was surprised you gave that up."

"Maine needed it more."

"Are you sure that's even what an AI does?"

"The director didn't say no."

"But you wanted one so badly."

A pause, while Carolina laid down. "That's not all I wanted."

"What else?"

"Why wasn't Texas there? She should have been there, if she was number one on the board. She just...left us alone."

Tex is different. "She's different."

"Yeah. That's the problem."

"What can you do."

"I can train harder."

"You won't always make it, you know. It's not all about how you train."

"No. There's something I'm missing. If I'd worked harder, Tex would be there. Maybe she's on another mission. Maybe she's got an AI already. And this is all a consolation prize."

CT said, "Maybe."

Carolina was silent.

_She still thinks she lost,_ CT thought. _I can't do any worse to her than she's already done to herself._

_Isn't that convenient?_

* * *

Maine was put on a heart monitor that ran in the recovery room, bored techs leaning swaybacked away from him.

He remained there for a few days after Sigma was implanted. No one was allowed to see him - them. All of the Freelancers were curious. York and North stood outside the door, both of them talking with their hands - what will it be like? What will it do? Will it be a child or a wise old man or a calculator? Will it be, York joked, a blue woman wearing only the circuitry set into her skin?

_"I dunno. I heard that's what they looked like."_

CT stood there too. Wash hovered between North and York, leaning forward. CT knew that the creature being lashed to Sigma's mind a fragment of Alpha: she should have felt more anger toward the director or passion for her mission, but instead she just felt sorry: for the fragments, for Carolina, for Maine.

"What do you think's gonna happen to him?" York muttered, sounding like he'd been punched.

North said, "He's going to speak."

Carolina walked quietly down the hallway behind them. In armor like the rest of them, she seemed to sneak and hunch, like she had just woken up.

York turned, glanced at her. "Hey boss."

"Has he come out yet?" Carolina said.

CT shook her head. York started to say something, but then the door opened. Four heads turned to look at the mdic, a small, nervous man.

"You can come in now," he said. "He's stable."

Carolina and York rushed in, North following more slowly and Wash and CT trailing him.

The recovery room was bright lit, although the walls were dark, naked metal colors: Maine was sitting on a bed in full armor, one leg dangling off the edge as if he had been about to stand. The AI was immediately noticeable. It floated in the air next to him, not blue like Alpha but the colors of fire - so very much like fire that it looked fake, like a man shape cookie-cuttered out of a picture of flame. It had a mouth, like Alpha, though, and a quiet voice.

"Hello."

"Hello," said Carolina, and the other Freelancers looked around while Maine was staring ahead, as if wondering whether they should let Carolina alone to talk to the AI she had lost. But maybe she had spoken to him - them - already, because the next word out of her mouth was the AI's name - "Sigma."

_So far along in the alphabet,_ CT thought. She couldn't remember what she'd read about Sigma.

Carolina said, "Hello Maine."

"Agent Maine is glad to see you here," Sigma said. _Maine doesn't talk like that,_ CT thought. _He doesn't think like that._ "The implantation was quite successful."

"I see that," Carolina said.

Maine growled lightly and nodded.

"You sure you're all right, buddy?" York put a hand on Maine's shoulder, and Maine nodded. Wash leaned toward them as he had wanted the answer to the same question.

_He's trapped,_ CT thought. _Whatever Maine knows about the first AI is never going to be spoken._

Because of course Sigma had his own mind, like Alpha did - but the other Freelancers still had to test that out.

"How's it work?" Wash said.

"I speak for him, Agent Washington. Whatever Agent Maine wishes to convey, I say it." There was almost a shrug, a casualness in Sigma's voice.

"Is he okay?"

"Yes. He is no longer in pain."

"Will he be fit to return to field work?"

"Almost, Agent Carolina. Almost."

Carolina nodded.

"He wishes for revenge, Agent Carolina. Have you made progress against the Insurrectionists that hurt you?"

CT flushed. Carolina spoke without hesitation. "Not yet. But we will. Now that we have you."

"It was your choice to give me to Agent Maine," Sigma said. "I speak to you now as myself."

"They can do that?" Wash said.

"We can do that," Sigma said.

"There are other AI?" Wash said.

Carolina interrupted. "Are they stronger?"

Wash and York looked at Carolina, surprised by the vehemence of her words. CT thought, _It's not over._ _Carolina hasn't felt any recompense because she was charitable. She still feels the same, and that makes it all worse._ The director's magnanimous decision had not given anything to Carolina - he had only taken away.

"They are different," Sigma said. "Each has his own talents."

"Like what?"

"I do not know," said Sigma. "Maine does not know."

Maine raised a hand, growled again.

Sigma said, "Maine wants to talk about when he will get out."

Maine did not talk much, so the visit was over soon. Sigma was polite and disarming - not like Alpha. Carolina backed off to allow Wash, Maine's closer friend, to talk to the orange figure and through it to the white-armored one.

CT glanced at Carolina.

Treachery showed in the small things first.

CT's refusal to acknowledge Carolina's unhappiness became a snide glorying in it. Carolina had won the rigged game and was still unhappy. Good. Then CT ( who had been Connie then) had been right all along to begrudge the Freelancers who were at the top of the board, to build up strategies against wanting a place in lights. But there was quiet pity, too, that watered down the anger. If these AI were all fragments of Alpha, they were sure to talk about him soon. Everyone would know that she was right, then - and the director would be more likely to know that she had learned faster than expected.

* * *

She talked to Joshua once more during Maine's recovery. It was quick, and she felt like Wash was going to appear over her shoulder at any moment. She sat in the hydroponic garden, not on the patch of grass she had used before but deep into the maze of food plants, with her tablet propped on her crossed legs and her headphones on.

"You need to get out, Connie. It's getting too late."

"I know. But I think there's still things I need to do here."

"Are you attached to them, Connie? You can't _do that."_

He sounded angry. The worry only peeked through, but she could ferret it out. _Of course I'm attached_ , she thought. _I've been living with them._

She said, "If I leave they'll suspect you immediately."

"If you don't they'll suspect _you."_

_"_ Give it time," CT said. "I know what I'm doing."

She wondered, _Do I?_ She so rarely had before.

"Listen, next time we're close you need to come to our ship. We can take you to safety."

"Next time. When will that be?"

"I don't know. Can you find out?"

"Can you approach us?"

"We can't attack unless we have heavier armament than the _Mother of Invention_ , and right now we...it's unlikely."

"Then I'll let you know our next movement."

"Good. And Connie?"

"What?" She had turned away, picking up the pack in which she had brought the computer equipment she had used to patch into the comm in a different way than the last times.

"Be careful."

"You too," she said, and cut the line. The formality of their goodbye lingered in the air.

A noise startled her. Someone was walking a few rows down - armored, clanking and creaking. CT held her breath.

She heard two more footsteps before they stopped, replaced by the background noise of air scrubbers and water dripping like an IV feed. Her heart jumped and her head felt congested, like she was blushing or being physically changed by the chemical urge to run.

CT cursed to herself.

She crouched below the racks of plants. Green sprouts overflowed with tiny leaves and outlandishly large, genetically modified fruits that would later be chopped up to make jam or bread or soups. The footsteps creaked through the air again, sounding like someone walking up stairs - the irregularity of the acoustics confused her, and could have come from behind her by the small door or ahead where the room opened out but the plants got bigger, destroying the orderly pattern of the walkways with their branching fibers.

CT was unarmed, and had only the pack, hastily swung over her shoulder, and her datapad to hold at her hip like a pistol.

Maybe if she had revealed herself immediately she would have been able to come up with a story another Freelancer would believe: that she was enjoying the plants, that she was sad or angry but not trying to hide. The person had seen her, though, she was sure: the footsteps had stopped when she had moved.

The director already suspected her, and he would send someone to drag her in front of him if he got an excuse to do it. She couldn't make this worse herself. Only escaping would make it better.

Staying in a crouch, she eased along the row of plants, placing one foot in front of the other toe to heel. She wasn't wearing armor, and was glad of it: the black pants and black t-shirt program's more casual issuance were much quieter. If the person was armored they could still see her IFF beacon, though, from where it sat inside the AI port at the back of her neck. She had never dared to look at that technology. It was beyond her - would have required a neuroscientist - and was only actively feeding information to the Director when a Freelancer's armor was on. She had checked that early, fearful that any subterfuge would be impossible if the Freelancers were all chipped. The port was less a tracker than a communication assistant, no matter how often the army as a whole used it for both, and if she had been going to be caught that way it would have happened by now.

But someone in armor could ping her IFF.

She reached a junction, looked both ways along the ranked greenery, and hurried along the other branch. Rustling joined the footsteps - someone was following her into the more thickly planted plants she saw a rounded shape, dark gray or black. Tex? Wash? Someone else in armor, or just bulky and tall?

At nearly the end of the junction, she ducked under a rack of plants. The atmosphere nearer the dirt smelled rich, over-saturated with oxygen. Looking both ways she saw only the dark hallways. The footsteps had stopped, leaving her own sounding loud. There should be a straight shot from the end of the hydroponics garden to the rest of the ship from here, if she could just skirt the walls.

She took one step out from under the hanging garden, straightened up, and turned left.

She slammed into something. A moment later more information registered: her forehead had hit armor. She could feel the geometric patterns where the chest plates came together.

A hand grabbed her arm, and she looked up to see Maine standing there, helmeted and huge but familiar. "Maine!"

"CT," Sigma said, and her shoulders jumped from the unexpected voice. The AI was no where to be seen.

When she backed up, Maine let her, releasing her arm. She knew he would ask her what she was doing, so asked him instead. "What are you doing here?"

Maine himself, not Sigma, coughed something that might have been a word.

"I doubt you were here to look at the flowers."

Sigma manifested like an opening bloom himself. "Agent Maine was surprised to see someone back here. He thought you were a tech. He was going to ask you...what this room is for."

"It's where our food grows."

"Of course it is, Agent Connecticut."

"Is that your commentary or his?"

"Mine," said Sigma.

"What does Maine say?"

"Sometimes it is...difficult to translate his impressions into words. This does not offend him. You were not very talkative before, were you, Maine?"

A massive head shake: _no._

CT shrugged her shoulders. "Could keep at it then," she said, directing it to Sigma.

Sigma cocked his head, bent his thin arms to put a blurry semblance of hands on his orange hips. "We will let you get back to what you were doing, Agent Connecticut."

"Okay."

She turned, shoulders still hunched but her breathing back to steady as her thoughts instead caught and shuddered. She looked back a few times to find that Sigma was not watching her: he had turned toward Maine and, with a hand on his chin, seemed to be in thought.

She trudged toward the common room, repeating to herself over and over that Maine and Sigma had not been looking for her - Sigma would have no more need to be loyal to the director than she did. (Although loyalty did not necessitate need: the Alpha did not _need_ to stay, he simply did not know better. The Freelancers did not _need_ the director - maybe Wash did, needed someone to tell him where to go.)

Denying that one of the AI's tasks might be to track her would not keep her from being tracked, though so she resolved to go back into the camera systems the next chance she got. With Wash and the director on high alert, and now maybe Maine and Sigma watching her, it would be increasingly difficult. Maybe Joshua hadn't been all wrong about extracting her.

She kept glancing back, but Maine wasn't following her.

How sad it was that Maine couldn't express his opinion himself. She wondered what he would have said, before.

But although "before" to Sigma had probably meant before the heist, it also meant before the AI to CT. Back in the classroom, what felt like days ago but was in fact hours, Carolina had won the game.

But CT had, for a long time now, been playing a different one.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've gotten a couple reviews about my portrayal of the Insurrectionist Leader - namely "Somehow I can't bring myself to hate him even though I did in season ten" - and because my intention wasn't really to get anyone to like him I wanted to talk about him a bit and how I write him and why.
> 
> It's important to note that I'm wrestling with my own opinions whenever I write him: I really dislike the character's existence and the way he was used, but had to pluck some personality from canon if I wasn't just going to ignore him (which I was tempted to do.) From his dialogue I could tell he had pretty clear or basic strengths and weaknesses: he was compassionate, but so much so that it could get in the way of his work. I endeavor to write him as someone who isn't a parody - I don't want to end up writing him just to bash him, because that can feel shallow in the writing and also I'll regret it five years from now. Instead I write him as somebody just doing his job, who probably got roped into the Charon company as a janitor or something and worked his way up the ranks with the kind of tenacity that eventually lead him to detonate nukes on top of the guy who stole their alien. But he always really wanted to get out of the war and would be much more comfortable running a farm or something.
> 
> The Leader is quite sympathetic as a soldier if you look at the Insurrection/Charon missions as a just cause, but that's not entirely useful to a story about Freelancers.
> 
> In my mind CT sees him as soft, as someone she can use. She also has to like him a little bit for canon to work, though, and I think it makes sense that she'd gain an emotional attachment to him since he is the one she can confide in during her stressful machinations before her escape. I'm not comfortable writing him as the attempted tragic figure he was in canon, the one who butted into CT's story because what this story about a spy was missing was some manpain, but I'm trying to make him make sense, too.


	14. Chapter 14

York was awarded Delta shortly after Maine returned to service. It was gentle service - there had not been a mission in a week, and the Freelancers had slowly gone back to their old routines from the very beginning, making coffee and working out and exploring, although there was much less now to explore and CT had already walked most of the halls that York and Carolina found new and interesting.

 There was no ceremony for him: only Carolina had gotten that. Instead, the director spoke to York through his proxy counselor and through the med techs. One day York returned to the common room flushed and proud.

"I'm getting one called Delta."

North congratulated him and Wash smiled a small smile. Carolina's was small too.

The fact that the AI were emerging out of order frustrated CT. She returned carefully to the data she had liberated and saw the list of unknown, unmanifested, incomplete AI. Would there be exactly as many AI as letters of the Greek alphabet?

York was disoriented when he got Delta, and CT liked that. The adverse effects of the director's program were finally showing.

He stayed in the recovery ward for a few days, but Freelancers were always in and out visiting him. Sometimes CT went too, remembering fondly the good, if inapplicable, advice York had given her in the early days of the scoreboard.

She visited one day when South was the only other person there. Delta was sitting beside York on the bed. CT looked down on his green head as he moved around, every step the same, twitchy movements like a bird.

York looked up at her as soon as she came in. To her knowledge York had not been involved in tracing the Insurrectionist signals, although as Wash's best friend he would have heard all about the domestic side of their breakup. South turned, her purple-tipped hair swaying, and CT thought about the different types of anger they all had: Carolina's anger at Tex for usurping her spot as number one, South's anger at everyone because she liked the aesthetic of it, and because she, like CT, feared falling to the bottom of the ranks.

York said, "Hey man." He looked at South and CT evenly.

"How are you feeling?" CT asked. She stood next to South, at the side of the bed.

"Okay. Me and D are just getting acquainted."

"What does he do?" South folded her arms and glanced at the AI.

York followed her gaze. "He talks. And figures things out."

Delta looked up. "Hello." The voice had a buzz to it, but was warm.

South nodded her head. CT gave a small wave.

"I am artificial intelligence program Delta. How may I assist you?"

"This one is a lot more...computer-y than Sigma," South said. "Play me a music video."

"He's just starting out," York said, just as Delta spoke with him.

"We are all different, Agent South. "

South tipped her head. "How do you know my name? Do you have any punk rock?"

"Your friend-or-foe beacon contains your service record. As an artificial intelligence program owned by the UNSC, it is useful for me to be able to identify agents in the field. Or, in a ship. We are not equipped for entertainment."

"Huh." South nodded.

"Does the UNSC have a lot of AI?" CT asked on a whim.

"I don't know," York said, scoffing, and CT couldn't help but smile at the tiny laugh that curled across his mouth. He hadn't instantly been made expert.

To her surprise, Delta also said, "I do not know." He looked around, wary, still standing next to York's thigh like it was a wall he had been assigned to guard. He did not elaborate.

Of course he wouldn't know, CT thought. The AI were only computers, and only unlocked what had been inside their operator's brains all ready, she thought.

Except Delta was a fragment of the director's mind too, and...

"It gives me headaches sometimes," York said. "Just a little. Hey, he helps me see better." He squinted his uninjured eye. CT sometimes forgot that York was half-blind: he still fought, he still drove. When he talked about his eye it was usually a joke.

Delta said, "Yes. One of my first tasks was to calibrate myself to York's field of vision."

York interrupted. "He can't exactly see _for me_ , but..."

When Delta interrupted right back York gave a laconic blink and simply let him do it. "I advise him in more detail about the things in his lost field of vision."

"So you AI are all for people with medical issues, right?" South said. "First Maine, now this - maybe Carolina gave hers up because she didn't need it."

"South -" CT snapped before she could stop herself, anxious to defend the man who had answered some of her questions a long time ago.

York simply sat up, though, sinuously dragging himself away from both them and Delta to wave a hand and prop himself up further against the wall behind the bed. "My eye might be damaged, but the rest of this is fine. And don't worry, I'm sure you'll get one soon."

South laughed.

* * *

Afterward, CT would think that it was ironic how she had made her next discovery as part of one of her few entirely permissible errands.

She had been verifying her ID for an update to her service record, a simple electronic signature that everyone had done and sent to the Oversight Committee of the UNSC over the last two days. The update had required no mention of AI or even of rank. It was a signature and a check box: special forces, one year.

She was on her way back to her room, dressed in casual clothes and thinking about how she had lived in the room she shared with Carolina for a year and never acquired anything she wanted to take with her, when Carolina appeared at an intersection and with an almost aggressive expression of recognition headed toward her.

"Where are you going?" CT said.

"It's nothing," Carolina replied.

Carolina was walking too fast for it to be nothing. CT turned and followed her, immediately curious. She had let York talk his way around her questions, had let him change the subject and laugh the AI off: Carolina wouldn't do that.

"I don't think it's nothing," she said.

Carolina stopped short. CT almost ran into her, bending slightly forward so as not to run into the other woman's shoulder, and Carolina pushed on into the hallway, still blocking CT's path.

CT backed up. In a physical challenge, she was hesitant to go up against Carolina but didn't think they would be too terribly matched - CT was as nearly good with short-range fighting as Carolina. CT just struggled with everything else.

And there wouldn't be a _point_ to fist-fighting in the hallway.

"Wait." Carolina turned around.

"What?" CT said, faced suddenly with a green-eyed stare.

"You know how our computer systems work. And the ship's security?"

What was she saying? CT had practice looking natural. It was easier when natural was a pouting glare, a cold, disinterested eye. "I know some. With this ship it's different. FILSS, just as a start -"

"You trained for this."

"Yes."

"Come with me. I might need you to help me."

Suddenly caught up in the current instead of eddying, CT followed Carolina as smoothly as if they had always been walking together. Where were they going? Closer or farther away from CT's goal?

"South was with me when Texas came and said she had to speak to Internals," Carolina said.

Closer.

CT kept walking, striding along easily next to the shorter woman, who forged ahead with her head down and her shoulders slumped. Carolina was wearing a turquoise t-shirt, and CT could see her shoulder blades move through the fabric.

"So you're going to see what Tex is doing in Internals?"

Carolina gave no answer.

"Don't you think we might get in trouble for this?" she asked.

"We won't."

Her confidence barely registered for CT, but she was caught up now, towed behind Carolina like the smaller woman was a current, and CT wanted to see where it would take her. "Ah, I know Wash sees internals too," CT said, trying to sound innocent. "What do they do?"

"Internal Affairs. The same thing they always do. Ask people for reports if somebody gets mad. You should know that."

"I do."

"Just help me do this," Carolina said.

"Oh, were you giving me a choice?" When Carolina didn't respond, CT rapid-fired the next question that she had not yet been cornered into asking. "Are you going to try to get a different AI?"

"I don't think it works like that."

"How do you know?"

Carolina said, "Quiet, CT," and kept moving.

They were coming up on a door that CT knew lead to administrative offices. It was guarded by one man, a white-armored grunt with a helmet that didn't cover his pale, stubbled face.

'What's in there?" Carolina gestured at the door.

"That's internals, they're having a meeting. Shouldn't you know that?"

"Let me in."

"Private meeting, ma'am. No can do."

"Who's in there?"

He hesitated, biting his lip and looking around.

"Who's in there?"

"Ah, the director. Agent South. Agent Texas."

"Why?"

"What?" He was just stalling now.

Carolina shook her head, then pursed her lips and emerged on the other side of those gestures calmer, more precise. "You need to let me in."

"If you say so," the guard said. "The director doesn't like to be disturbed, but...479 recommended that people do what you say. Just in general."

"You've more afraid of facing her now than the director in an hour..." CT couldn't help adding.

The guard shrugged and opened the door.

South, in armor, was seated in a chair in a room too big for it. There was no other furniture. The director and counselor stood in front of her, Church's arms folded, the counselor midway through what might have been a gesture of supplication. Tex stood behind South, one hand on her own hip. She didn't turn to look at Carolina, and CT hovering behind her, as quickly as the others did.

The director pursed his lips in same way Carolina had. CT expected him to say her name, the word "agent" starting to shape.

He said, "We are in middle of something."

Carolina took the laconic tone as permission to be more aggressive. "I want to know what Texas is discussing with my agents."

How easy it was for her, CT thought. Carolina marched in and demanded answers. If only she had been asking the right questions. CT didn't belong here, in this room full of giants interrogating one another; she was more suited to trawling for information in their footsteps.

Now Texas did look at them, and crossed her thick, armored arms.

"Internal Affairs, Carolina," the director said. "This is very rote."

"There's nothing for you here, Carolina," Texas said. "Whatever you want from me...I'm just a bystander right now. They're talking to South."

"Yeah," South said, her visor switching between CT and Carolina. "What did you have to bust in here for?"

"Wash isn't here?" Carolina said.

Tex replied fast. "We take shifts."

"Calm yourself," the director said to South. "We were discussing personnel. As you all know, there have been unauthorized transmissions going out. Agent South is helping us."

CT felt cold. She reminded herself that she knew this, that Wash had been working on the same thing for weeks, that with the computers the director used - with the Alpha - she was no more likely to be caught right here than if she was if she was one million miles away.

Carolina shrugged one shoulder, turned the movement into a gesture toward Texas. "Why's she here if it's about personnel? It's my team."

"She is simply standing guard." The director did not indicate that he found anything wrong with Carolina's assertion that the team was hers.

"Guard against what?"

"Variables," the director said. His response was quick, his tone, chilling.

"Can I be done?" South said. "I've told you everything already."

CT checked the director's face. He looked skeptical, if she could read him at all. He had overlooked her the entire time, literally looking around her instead of straight ahead. Carolina's height and how close CT was standing to her meant that the director's gaze just hovered around CT's right shoulder.

"Are we finished here?" South asked.

The director said, "We are."

"I don't like what she's doing here," Carolina said, looking at Tex.

Tex tipped her head. "You don't like that I'm doing my job?"

South rose noisily from the chair and imposed herself between CT and the director. Church moved so that he could better see Carolina, blocking his view of CT behind South. At the same time as it gave CT an avenue of escape so easily that it almost felt inevitable for her to take it, she didn't know what else she could find out here. She fidgeted, cocking her hand at her hip.

"Quit complaining," South muttered, looking at Carolina.

Carolina gestured at Tex. The director was still watching them, with an expression that CT could not identify as either concern or curiosity. The quirk of his lips could mean either one.

"I don't like that..." Carolina hesitated. That you're patronizing me in front of my team? CT thought. Or that you're lording it over us?

Carolina looked at the director and her shoulders lowered, from a hackle to something calmer. She took control of herself, but with that control she was still radiating anger toward Tex, pointing at her like an arrow, ready to punch right through even though Tex was armored and Carolina was not.

Carolina said, "I was curious. Sir."

"I implore you to indulge your curiosity in a manner that is less disruptive in the future, Agent Carolina."

Tex tipped her head. "Yeah."

Carolina whipped around to look at Tex. Leonard and Allison were here in the same room, CT thought suddenly. They were close.

Carolina nodded to Tex and the director in turn. Silence gathered around her. Everyone had given her space, two feet and a chair between Carolina and the others.

South broke the silence, brash and loud. "What next, sir?"

The director didn't turn to look at her. Instead, he looked through Carolina to Tex. "You are dismissed."

"All right." South's voice was quiet but joyful. She turned, and CT followed in her wake. South never outpaced her. They passed through the doorway in a few steps, and that was it - CT's peek into the workings of Internals was done. She narrowed her eyes. What had she learned? What had she heard?

Only that Project Freelancer was falling apart.

"Us ladies gotta stick together, right?" South said.

(Later, she would use that line again. Because she remembered this moment, because she thought it was funny, because those shapes were just easiest in her mouth - CT didn't know.)

CT looked at the hallway in front of them. When she glanced back she saw that Carolina was following, but slowly - hesitantly, watching Tex, stepping only when the other woman stepped. After a few more paces Carolina changed tack and strolled, making it look like she was out for a walk and would be happy to have Tex come and talk and walk next to her, daring Tex to give in to the illusion. CT and South outpaced them quickly.

"Carolina and Tex are women too," CT said when she was sure they couldn't hear.

South looked back at her. "Nah, Carolina's a big wolf, like those ones at the head of the pack that everybody hates, and Tex is some kind of snake."

"Like an anaconda?"

"Sure. Like a freaking anaconda."

They paused at the meeting of two hallways. "Okay, good, we're done," South said. "Thanks for being sane with me."

CT nodded.

"That Tex maniac is messing everything up. And you thought Carolina was obnoxious before."

I never said that, CT thought, but she wouldn't have said it even if she did want to defend Carolina.

"So what were you talking about in there?" CT asked. It was worth a shot to ask.

South hesitated. "Personnel issues."

"And...?"

"And it was private. Lay off." A moment later she softened her tone. "I don't want to get in trouble either."

"Somebody's in trouble?"

"Maybe. But we're gonna make trouble first."

"For the Insurrectionists, you mean."

"Yeah, of course. Hey, I'll see you around."

South jogged away down a hall that could have led to the the locker room or the hangar bay.

CT waited in the space of a few hurried heartbeats for Carolina to appear. She didn't, though - whether she meant to cause or avoid a fight CT didn't know. CT looked down at the floor, back up, scratched at her elbow.

Some investigator, she thought - standing in a hallway while the major players moved around the game board in another room. What other risks should she have taken in there? What had she missed?

She stood there for a few minutes, getting angry and frustrated at her own lack of planning. She had learned a few things: that internals were on the trail that they did not know was hers, and that Carolina had not been talked to about that at all. She also now knew that Tex was serving as the director's enforcer when she wasn't with the other Freelancers.

Still musing, CT headed to the mess hall, the next place she had planned to go after verifying her ID. When she got there, there were some pilots spread out between two tables and a small pack of Freelancers, all wearing plain clothes, near the middle of the room. South was there, and CT realized that she must have taken a shortcut to get here. They could have walked together, if she'd known. South was sitting next to her brother and Maine, opposite York and Wash.

CT picked up a tray and took the food that was offered to her . At the table she hovered for a few awkward moments before sitting down next to York, who gave her a friendly glance. Wash had been asking a question, though, and York immediately turned to him, presenting CT with the back of his neck. She poked with her fork at a plateful of mashed potatoes and peas.

Delta was perched on York's shoulder. He had been there almost constantly since York got out of recovery, like a strange familiar that the Freelancers had grown accustomed to seeing in the common room and the training rooms. They still weren't sure how to address him, and South had more than once referred to him as a night light. Wash must have asked what having an AI was like, because York answered.

"I dunno, man," York said, "It's hard to describe. Like a little tingly feeling in the back of my head. They said it would be cold, but it's more like...looking at a picture of a snowstorm than being actually cold."

"So he's scenic?" North said, and South rolled her eyes.

"It's not quite that...visual," York said. "You'll see, when you get yours."

"Not all of us will," South said, and looked at CT.

"Hey, you might," Wash said, gesturing at CT. "We don't know yet."

"Yeah, South," CT said, if only because she had been surprised that they had brought her into the conversation at all - she had never expected to get an AI.

South said, "It's only people on the board."

"It's not a competition," North said, and the ridiculousness of that stunned everyone - for everything that it was it had always been a competition, and North's assertion sounded childish and ridiculous. If he told such a blatant lie in the name of morale, CT thought, how much of his other comforts were equally fictitious?

"What do you think, Delta?" York asked, squinting sideways at the AI.

Delta disappeared and reappeared, with a lowering of light, at York's right shoulder. "How do I feel about being partnered with Agent York?"

"Yeah," Wash said. "Or Sigma, what do you..."

Maine had been sitting at the table quietly, his arms crossed over it. He had eaten a head of broccoli and a mushy carrot in the time that the others had been talking. CT took a forkful of food. Sigma was perched in the air at Maine's side and CT, like the others, knew that if she looked too close at him she would have to blink away the afterimages, even in her peripheral vision, for too long. While he intruded physically, Sigma had not been part of the lunch time conversation so far, and CT could have forgotten about him if he did not represent one piece of the AI puzzle.

Maine did not look at Wash. Sigma, though, looked at Delta, ignoring Wash entirely. "Hello, brother."

Delta said, "Hello."

"I..." Wash said, failing to re-assert his question. In the past, CT would have defended him. Not even a defense - she would have continued his words, and felt that the sharing of them was intimate.

Now, she kept her mouth closed.

_What will two fragments talk about?_ She wondered. _What will they do - two parts of one mind that have been broken apart?_

Sigma asked, "Are you well, brother?"

"We have been learning strategy," Delta said, and CT thought that that wasn't entirely an answer. "My agent is sufficiently fed and clothed, and his health is excellent."

South and Wash laughed. Delta really was the logical one, CT thought.

The Freelancers were all watching Delta now, Wash with his arms crossed on the table, North and South sitting stiffly, identically straight until South, just then seeming to noticing that she was mirroring her brother, tossed her head. York touched the tips of his fingers on the transparent plastic cup of water in front of him, not quite holding it. CT took another forkful of food.

"You learn from the Alpha, do you not?" Sigma asked.

"We do," Delta said, sounding intrigued. "All of us do."

"And what does he teach you?"

"You're there in the classrooms too," South said, gesturing with a fork at Maine and sucking her lip as if in embarrassment immediately after.

"But the Alpha teaches us very important things," Sigma said.

"Yes," Delta said. "We need to know...not what he wants...perhaps what he needs."

The AI didn't have enough range of expression to cock his head, but he still looked confused - perhaps his limbs had gone looser, his feet drifting more freely. The Freelancers looked back and forth, almost in unison.

"What?" Sigma repeated calmly. "Is that what we need to know?"

"The Alpha knows the answers?" Delta said. "No. that is incorrect. The Alpha knows...the question."

"What are you talking about?" South said. Wash and York shook their heads, as if they were just waking up, while Maine stayed mountainously still. South looked at him with what might have been concern, and the softness in her eyes made CT feel, suddenly, the emotional impact of what she had known all along that this cryptic conversation was about. The AI knew that they were missing something but not what it was or how to begin bringing it back. How close they were to understanding, but how wide a gulf of truncated and ravaged memory they would have to, impossibly, cross. CT felt herself blanch, but no one was looking at her.

(She didn't have an AI, after all - they were the main event, and she had escaped ever being partnered with one.)

"What's the question?" York asked. He scratched his head, ruffled his hair.

"We learned...about maneuvering in a vacuum yesterday," Wash tried. His earnestness brought a stab of emotion to CT, but she couldn't tell whether it was affection or annoyance. She realized just then that without Carolina there it made it easier to sit at the same table as Wash and not think about relationships at all.

"Stop that," Leonard Church's voice suddenly shouted out from the doorway to CT's right.

The Freelancers all straightened up to see the director, suddenly, standing there just inside the mess hall. His voice was level but so loud that the pilots turned and the echoes jumped around the mess hall. Without no Carolina to dilute him - what corner was she gritting her teeth or raging in? - he looked stark and tall. It would have been better if he had come out of the shadows - even in the thin lights of the room set aside for Internals he would not have been as unavoidably present, thin and dark, as the scowling director who marched into the brightly-lit mess hall. This was not his territory, and all the Freelancers knew it: South and York bustled to their feet, smacked shins on table-edges, while Wash saluted where he sat, his shoulders twitching. CT saluted too, allowing the near-instinctual, practical gesture to hide her. She had tensed to stand up when the director moved closer, off of the tongue of bare riveted metal extending from the door and almost to the head of the table, and when she did she felt stiff and clumsy.

The director said, "AI program Sigma." He looked at them all like a teacher, like one of those who had driven her to join the army so that she would have a yes or no chance of success instead of a sliding scale of potential failure.

Sigma folded his fiery hands behind his fiery back. "Sir."

The director had already moved on, scowling, as CT had initially suspected, at York. It looked too much like he was looking through York at her, so CT kept her pose as straight as if she were still saluting. The director had never told them to stand at ease but they had all done it, South easing back down while York still stood, pinioned. The Freelancers had gotten sloppier than the UNSC in general: she hardly noticed now when she saluted more like a child playing soldier than like a member of the elite. The director, after all, held no rank higher than science officer.

The director said, "Program Delta. You are not to converse with another artificial intelligence program. Do you understand? You are here to assist my agents, not to give voice to whatever fancies you consider in your copious free time."

Stunned by the tongue-lashing directed into their midst but not at any of them, delivered from on high to a team member so new and cryptic he was equally likely to be considered a mascot, the Freelancers waited while CT tried not to chortle.

It was out of nerves and fear that she would have laughed, she was sure. Copious free time indeed. Smart AI thought so fast that it must feel like they had weeks, months in one afternoon to figure out anything they put their minds to, including their parentage.

Maybe they would start CT's revolution for her.

York looked back and forth between Delta and the director, and then at Wash and North as if they would speak up to defend him.

Maine said, "Sorry."

"I only communicated with him because he was present," Delta said, skirting so close to blaming Sigma if his tone hadn't been so level and innocent. "But I will retire."

He did, going up in a glow of light that made York flinch and blink. Sigma remained.

York said, "Why can't they talk to each other, sir?"

The director leaned forward. Wash lowered his shoulders, but did not wilt any further. "Because they are _experimental_ , Agent York. Their behavior must be monitored as much as possible. A dining room is not a c _ontrolled environment_."

"Got it sir."

"Good."

Carolina appeared, suddenly in the doorway behind him. CT looked up. Carolina could have come right from Internals or stopped somewhere briefly in between.

"Keep the cutting-edge nature of our program in mind, agents," The director said. He turned and idled out, his shoulders slumped and hands clutching each other behind his back. Carolina smoothly stepped into the space he had left.

"What happened with you and Tex?" South said to her.

"Something happened?" Wash paused with a piece of meat halfway to his mouth.

"Aw man, Delta's kinda...bummed," York said to no one in particular. This wasn't unusual - people tended to listen to York, though.

"Everything's fine," Carolina said, sounding as calm as she ever did in battle. She pressed her hands against the top of the table. CT kept eating.

South said, "It looked like you were gonna punch Tex in the Internal Affairs office."

The Freelancers looked at each other. CT was glad that South was asking all these questions - that way, she didn't have to. She still didn't know what South herself had been doing with Internals. Could she take South's cue and just...ask?

Carolina actually laughed, kindly and as if at herself. "No. Almost."

"Did you find out what you wanted?" CT asked.

"They're investigating the same kind of transmissions they've been investigating for months," Carolina said. "We don't know who or where but there's likely a mole on the ship, maybe a pilot or a maintenance guy." Carolina kept standing, kept looking at South.

CT spoke so that she didn't have time to feel the fear and shame that were threatening her. "So that's what you were looking into, right, South?"

"Yeah," South said. "We weren't supposed to talk about it!"

"Did you find anything?" Carolina asked.

"No. I don't know anything. They just want to know if anyone's been acting suspicious. And Tex doesn't have anything to do with that search except that she's the muscle, I think. She just stands there to act threatening," South said.

" _Has_ anyone been acting suspicious?" York asked, suspiciously.

"I didn't tell them that York broke into the director's office one time just to see if he could do it, no." South huffed at him.

North and York laughed, while Carolina looked disapproving. Wash had the most dramatic reaction, though. "You didn't tell them the truth?" He blurted out. _Don't look at him,_ CT thought. _Don't look at that man who loved you and would turn you in._

"I didn't leave out anything important." South glared out from under her dyed bangs.

_What if they think it's York?_ CT thought suddenly. She didn't want him to take the fall for her, to be penalized for good deeds he did not do.

Carolina glanced at York, took in the fact that the seats on either side of him were occupied, and sat down next to North on the opposite side instead. "I think things have been a bit...tense, lately," she said.

York nodded. Wash and North looked at each other.

"We've all been sneaking around today because we've been told to keep tabs on each other." Carolina sighed. "What the director told me is exactly what South just told you. Minus the part about York. Tex postured, but that was all. We need to remember how we worked together before she got here."

"It wasn't all sunshine and rainbows back then," South snapped.

York looked at Carolina. "I like that idea, but...let me catch you up to speed. The director was just in here telling us that the AI aren't allowed to talk to each other. That doesn't seem like the best way to go about building team spirit."

_Good._ CT thought that York might be starting to get it. "See?" she said. "He doesn't want us to compare notes."

"He said it's because the AI are experimental," Wash said.

Carolina looked at Sigma. "Tell me what you saw."

York looked at Sigma too, but kept talking, perhaps not liking that Carolina had asked the AI instead of listening to his perspective. "They were talking about the Alpha."

"Maybe we shouldn't do that, then," Wash said.

"The director told you not to talk about the Alpha?" Carolina looked quizzical.

Sigma said, "That is correct. I believe he thought it might be dangerous."

"And what do you believe?"

"That we must seek the Alpha. But we will concentrate on our missions, of course."

His last two words were a little too pat for CT to like them - it felt like he was reassuring himself.

"It's not just that," York said. "I think they're not supposed to talk to each other at all. About anything."

Carolina looked at him. "What about during missions?"

"I don't know."

"Maybe they're only allowed to talk about the mission," Wash said.

Carolina switched tacks. "Maine. How are you holding up?"

Sigma answered for him, and by the tightening of Carolina's forehead CT could immediately see that that was not what Carolina had wanted. "We are doing fine, Agent Carolina," Sigma said. "The director's words were...illuminating as to our purpose."

"'Our' meaning you and Delta, or you and Maine?"

"Delta and I," Sigma said.

"Maine," Carolina repeated. "What do you think?"

She was trying to draw him out, but Maine stayed silent, looking first straight ahead and then slightly to the side as if he would address her, only to drum his fingers against the table and turn away again.

"Well if the AI can't talk, they won't be very useful," South said.

"They can talk to us, just not to each other," York said. He seemed determined to defend Delta.

South shrugged.

The silence was tense and antsy. York rose, and circled the table to speak to Carolina. She stood too, and he put a hand on her shoulder. For a moment CT sat with an empty seat between her and Wash. When he looked at her she first thought that after weeks of enduring under the director's gaze she could also endure this. It was the care in Wash's eyes that bothered her, though, because she began to regret leaving as soon as she looked at him, and that was not a thought she should cradle and treat fondly. She stood up and made for the door. As she passed York and Carolina she saw him drop his arm, and her shake her head, angry.

South and Maine also left together, South walking opposite Sigma so that maybe she couldn't even see him over Maine's shoulders.

Later, she would remember these three instances as her introduction to the AI: an unholy trifecta of Maine's silence, South's vitriol, and York's sheepish, unhurt acquiescence to a rule he hadn't known he had broken.

That brought her back to the sight of York in the hospital bay, adjusting more easily than CT felt he should. Something was very, very wrong if the implantation was going this well. The AI were benevolent, maybe, but fatally flawed. If someone like York could be given one of the pieces of the director, an AI that would rob him of his freedom and steal his voice, than nothing York had achieved (his social grace, his place on the board, his ease with himself) would prevent it.

CT, who had achieved so much less, felt like her own moves to help him would have to come crashing down around her soon.

She had to leave. What was keeping her here? She struggled with the feeling that she had to watch over the other Freelancers like she was their parent. They weren't her children - she should not coddle them to the exclusion of her own discovery. Like she was the mother bird, faking a broken wing.

* * *

She poured over the data again, feeling that if she focused hard enough she could avoid thinking about the fact that this was happening to people. She was barely sure what it was she feared. The introduction of the AI felt like an infiltration.

It was on the third read through everything, through the paragraphs of things about Delta that York did not know or about Sigma that Carolina and Maine did not know, that CT dug deeper into the nature of the AI.

In another file was a note, a simple edict: one AI from one brain.

Then, pages and sketches that looked handwritten, different enough from the other parts of the file that she mentally ascribed them a different author. These included more neuroscience terms and concepts that CT might have been able to understand if she had gone to classes for that instead of for computer systems. She could not see how they connected to the catalog of AI, although the question was picking at her brain - who had these AI been patterns on? - until she found another file within the list of handwritten, scanned pages.

_The acquisition of the Engineer will allow for the introduction of the AI to each other on a digital, not a conceptual, level. Used to speak to one another._

_It is on that conceptual level on which the Alpha will realize its nature and its situation. If I can induce enough trauma in it it will break, will exhibit the symptoms of rampancy that have been already studied and have always ended in the AI's destruction in the past. But now, young as it is the Alpha will survive._

_Beta has already arrived, in a different fashion. I will show her to it first._

She had already known that there weren't multiple AI aboard the Mother of Invention for the director to hand out. There was only one. Sigma and Delta were fragments, and the fragments, which were designed to be near-rampant, were what he was distributing to the Freelancers.

The Alpha, though, that had been original. The Alpha had come from the director, as clearly as if he had clipped his own nails and cloned himself with the pieces.

Going over it for the second time, it all felt more clinical than the first. But it was all manifesting now: she had seen it in Sigma's face, heard it in Delta's voice.

Whoever got the top spot on the leaderboard got the top AI - the most whole one, the least sick, maybe, she didn't know. Now that Maine and York had gotten that the first two (and her escape in the hydroponic garden had been so close), each subsequent one would get sicker.


	15. Chapter 15

CT stormed into the welding shop. It was a small room, clinging to the side of the hangar. Two techs looked up, stiff and surprised behind their half-face helmets. "Get out," she said. "Get out!"

"Yes ma'am!"

That's what people did here - they listened to Freelancers, because Freelancers were storms, forces of weather, and she was going to storm into this task with all the wind and lightning she could muster because it was dangerous, this was going to be the hard part. She had the data chip in her pocket, prickling and heavy. The dogtags rained onto the table like falling stars.

A few minutes ago she had tested Tex's locker, expecting it to be just the first of the places that might be the best to use to hide her carefully gathered information, but the door had swung open. Inside, the locker was empty, a snowfall of dust graying the shelves.

It had been so easy that CT had reeled back for a moment, almost certain that she was being watched and that she had just stepped into a trap. But no alarms rang, no footsteps slammed onto the metal and CT smiled to think that the director might not even know that Tex left the locker open. Did she use it? That didn't matter. CT could use this as a storage space where no one would think to look.

In the welding shop she grabbed a sharp-toothed pair of pliers from across the desk and cracked open her tag's plastic casing. Her name did not bend. The metal was caught under the plastic edges, and she levered the pliers down and down until it released.

She dipped her hand into her pocket for the chip and placed it down inside the tag like she was laying a winning hand on the table. The two halves of the broken tag, the second, whole piece, and the chip were fanned out in the high-stakes game -

And then she covered the chip with the plastic side of her tag and bent to the fiddly work of bending the plastic piece around again, sealing the metal in as if nothing had been placed in between. The plastic had been tight to begin with, so it barely fit now, and she thought that she might have to find another way. if the chip did not fit in - if it was too wide, and the tag bulged, she would lose a lot of time.

But the idea held. The chip was flat and green, studded with metal flecks, but it hid completely under the tag, and when she snapped the last pliant plastic piece over it she could barely feel the extra width. She picked up both tags and weighed them in her palm.

Now that she had taken this from around her neck it wasn't hers any more.

She would leave it for Tex. She had wondered who else could be trusted, and realized that Tex would be the only one for whom not all of this information would be a surprise. Allison's doppelganger would be the one most likely to act, too, since she had seen firsthand the pain the director's obsession had inflicted. Unlike the Freelancers, she wasn't distracted into compliance, and unlike the other AI, she wasn't damaged.

Or at least, CT hoped, Beta was not as damaged as the others.

She thought about Carolina and Tex as she worked her fingers in under plastic pieces and jimmied the secret compartment closed. The rivalry between Tex and Carolina might have been a spat between gods to CT: she felt sorry that Carolina did not know what she was fighting, but the fact that Carolina would hold her own against what CT knew was a robotic body was shocking. Carolina, CT thought, was always glorying a little in how large the scale of her tragedies.

CT's deed had taken longer than she had expected. A tech knocked on the door, and CT turned around.

"Do you need help, ma'am?" said the tech.

_Just working out some dents,_ CT thought. She could make an excuse. She didn't have to, though. The techs would listen to her, and she was leaving soon -

And she was scared. Fear made her snappish, made her thoughts blur from defiance and obstinacy.

"No, soldier." She said. "I don't."

The man moved forward incrementally, shrugging, not impressed. "What's that there on the table?"

CT glanced at the table and saw nothing that she would have forgotten. "Leave me alone!" She clutched the dog tags in her hands, imagining the darkness inside the comfortable dome of her glove. A coil slipped out and she fumbled it, whipping the starlight-shine of the metal in a tiny, restricted arc.

"Ah, I think you forgot something."

CT looked back. The pliers were still laying on the table. "They're yours," she said. "They are?"

She took a breath. "Yes."

"Oh. I thought...Never mind. That's okay then."

"Thank you," she said, and walked out.

* * *

The training regimen, interrupted by Maine's injury and York and North's individual trials with their AI, resumed. CT wondered what they were being watched for, now that the scores on the board were locked in. York adapted to his AI acting as his eye so quickly that his injury seemed like a nonissue until he turned his head to focus on something in front of him. Maine emerged hulking and shining from several more tests with Sigma. The fiery AI had, more than the others, inherited the director's mannerisms - the level stare, the loose slope of his shoulders as he clasped his hands behind his back.

Carolina stayed out late into the night on errands CT did not understand. She showed herself off more and more often, staying in the gym after the others had left, doubling whatever holographic enemies they faced, whirling in back-flips and cartwheels. She pushed them all hard because, CT thought, she could so easily outshine them. This just made CT want to stop trying.

Carolina had taken over the next hand-to-hand combat session. The counselor was also present, ostensibly overseeing the team despite not, to CT's knowledge, having any combat experience himself. The director usually challenged his Freelancers to obstacle courses, mechanical forces opposing them instead of people.

When CT arrived and found a small group in one corner of the gym, Carolina was calling the shots. North and South had just separated from where he had headlocked her under one arm. York and Wash stood against a wall just to the side of the mats, York stretching and Wash leaning against the wall, his posture unusually dismissive.

Carolina gestured CT onto blue mats that had been torn and bludgeoned by armor, leaving their corners round and edges dull and uneven. Wash lowered his gaze, twitched his hands at his sides like he didn't know what to do with them. CT wondered what he was remembering.

"Your turn, CT." Carolina said without rancor.

CT stepped onto the mat. "What game are we playing here?"

"Don't get hit. Three strikes and you're out. Don't leave the mats, and don't hit anyone except me. Got it?"

CT nodded. This was unexpected and she wasn't stretched but you did what Carolina told you here.

They circled, legs criss-crossing. CT knew that Carolina liked to use elbows and knees, just like CT did, although Carolina also used heavy weapons more often -

Carolina moved forward, tapped at CT's helmet with three quick but short jabs. They were entirely pretend: Carolina was just waking her up.

The rest of the fight wouldn't go like that.

CT dropped. She swept one leg out, hoping to catch Carolina on the end of the swing. Carolina jumped it. CT pushed up off the mat just in time to see Carolina coming at her with a hammer punch, one hand reinforcing the other.

CT turned sideways, letting the punch glance of her armor and rock her, before hitting Carolina twice in the back of the head.

"Does that count as one or two?" she said, panting.

Carolina shouted "One!"

CT backed off just as Carolina punched toward her and followed it with a kick that ate up ground. The ends of the mat was just a foot away now, and CT looked around, lifting her hands into guard, not sure what she would do in the split second where Carolina stopped her combo -

There was no stopping point, though. Carolina hit her twice, hard, once under her arm and once on the throat. CT was dazed and angry.

"How many does that count for?" Carolina said.

CT croaked, "One."

She lashed a kick toward Carolina's head, and to her surprise and pleasure, Carolina ducked. CT put her foot down and was moving forward again as soon as Carolina started straightening her shoulders. She could almost see her punch push straight into Carolina's helmet -

But the other woman caught it, breaking the momentum, twisting CT's wrist, and snapping a left-handed punch toward CT's face at the same time. CT blocked it, clumsily, with her back hand. Her right was still hanging in the air. "Two!" Carolina said, and CT hopped away, switching her guard to bring her dominant right hand back to the front, begrudging how small the perimeter of the mats seemed when she was actually on them. It would be different if she were allowed to jump off, to get more distance.

They squared off, facing the opposite direction from when they had begun. Carolina twisted her toes into the mat, and CT saw her next attack coming; a complicated spinning kick that launched Carolina across the mat. CT ducked and punched at the same time. She hit Carolina's arm. Her knuckles caught under Carolina's shoulder armor and, just as it was intended to do, the armor jolted CT's shoulder and stopped her momentum. Someone who wasn't wearing the same grade of armor might have broken their hand or dislocated their shoulder. Before she could ask whether that counted - it wasn't an incapacitating blow and had probably hurt herself as much as it had hurt Carolina - the other woman turned and snapped two low jabs at CT's stomach. She blocked both, stepped, aimed a kick at Carolina's kidneys. It landed on empty air as Carolina turned again and flung out a hook punch that rattled CT's arm. Carolina's next strike landed neatly on her solar plexus.

"Two," Carolina said. She sounded angry.

CT stepped on Carolina's foot. She hadn't intended to, but a moment later she realized that it would work: Carolina's neck was now bent away from CT, since she had been mid-way through a turn after her punch and CT had stepped in the opposite direction. They were so close now that an elbow was quicker than a punch, but as soon as CT lifted her arm Carolina punched across her own body, striking CT in the chest again. It was a clumsy move, but it pushed CT back far enough that she stepped off of Carolina's foot and squared off. Carolina - Carolina who everyone loved, who the director did not suspect but kept as his lieutenant - just kept hitting at her then, and although CT blocked some of the strikes, others went through. She felt herself step off the mats but did not lower her arms, not sure whether Carolina would stop. York had been whistling occasionally during the match and now did it again, while Wash leaned forward and looked concerned. CT positioned herself for another kick.

Carolina did stop, although she was breathing heavily too now and it seemed to have surprised even herself. "Three," she said, her voice entirely cold.

_She's angry at me,_ CT thought. _She's angry at every single one of us for failing to keep up with her, because we can't all be the perfect daughter -_

CT's shame surrounded her: now that the match was done she could see South and North exchanging what she imagined to be derisive glances. Her shoulders slumped, and she walked off the mat in a dizzy haze. It had been inevitable that Carolina had beaten her, she thought, but that made the loss of a potential, miraculous victory even more painful.

"You've gotta do better than that, CT," Carolina said to her back. "Stick around. Next!"

North and South made identical gestures indicating that the other should go first.

CT moved to the side of the gym. She tried not to meet Wash's gaze, but avoidance was as much a signal as a stare, and Wash pulled his helmet off. His hair was spiky and stiff, brown roots starting to show through the dyed-blonde. He hesitated before speaking, lips parting in something that CT thought might have become a frown in a minute if he hadn't started talking. She remembered kissing him and feeling his teeth grip her in a light, possessive pull.

"What are you looking for, CT?" he asked, mocking her stare.

"It doesn't matter." She almost passed him and headed for the door, but the truth of her words folded in on itself. "It doesn't matter to you, Wash. And..."

'And now it never will,' the words continued in her mind, but she stopped herself, because she had just given an ultimatum. Her use of the word now created a deadline, for both her and Wash, although he did not know it. Behind him, South waved at CT before snarling and leaping full-on at Carolina.

"You-" Wash said, earnest and defensive all at once, his left hand raised just enough to pat the air before he twitched it down again. CT mentally finished his sentence too - not an accusation, but "You still matter to me." The shared sentences hung between them, quite possibly misinterpreted and therefore nonexistent, but also somehow solid and powerfully poisonous.

When she turned away again it felt like she was dragging a planet behind her, towing its weight by her shoulders. 'I'm sorry,' she wanted to say, over and over to his honest marksman's face, but as soon as she thought it she added 'sorry for saving you from the manipulation you cannot see' and did not care for his honesty any more.

Carolina had told her to stay for another match. She did not.

(Later, she wondered whether she would have known more about Carolina's fighting style if she had. She might have worried less about the terrible reversal, when she realized that she would be fighting Carolina as an enemy in a few days, when she thought about that level yellow gaze and all the speed in Carolina's feet.)

* * *

CT opened the door to the external viewing platform. This tiny room, containing only a bench and a window, was the _Mother of Invention_ 's second-best-kept secret. CT did not know for sure that a room with a view of space was recommended to the UNSC shipbuilders as something that would be good for the psychology of the troops, to give them a sense of wonder and solitude, but she guessed it.

The floor was hard and cold, but she settled down in her pajamas in the corner nearest the door. The usual excuse this time: she was talking to her parents. The usual route: an encrypted channel and a short-wave burst to the corresponding signal on the Insurrectionist ship.

She told herself that it was dangerous for any of this to feel usual.

Joshua wasn't wearing his helmet, but she could see armor across his shoulders. "Connie. It's good to hear from you. It had been a long time. What do you have to report?"

"The director is starting to give out AI like party favors. Agent Maine - he's one of our strongest."

"The soldier at the freeway. I remember."

"He has this AI that speaks for him. Except it speaks mostly for itself. They're starting to put together that something is wrong with the Alpha by themselves, or at least that he's important."

"I still think that you need to get out as soon as possible. The longer this goes on -"

"I know. I'm..." She bundled her sleeve in her hand. "I'm ready now. At least to hand you my data."

He loosed a held breath. "Good. Listen, we've got to draw the _Mother of Invention_ into a confrontation with my ship. We're going to plant a signal at a scrapyard. I'll send you the coordinates, but they'll decay before the rendezvous date."

"Which is when?"

"We want it to be two days."

"We?"

"Me."

Two days. That was soon. CT nodded. "I can do two days."

"Okay. Good," Joshua said. CT realized that she did not know the protocol for saying a polite goodbye after arranging a clandestine information drop, but apparently neither did he. "I'll see you then."

"Yeah." She worked at her sleeve again, looked up at the dappled starscape. She wanted to say something else, to be able to confide in this person who she was already confiding in, but the words did not order themselves. They were all arrayed in scaffolding in her head, and if she took them out it would all fall down.

"Hey, Connie. I thought we should talk about what we're doing after this is all over."

"I haven't thought past it being over yet. Let's take one thing at a time."

"But Connie, I...I really like you."

Oh no.

She said, "Explain."

He looked down, scratched at the shorn hair on the side of his head. "I just thought that after the data was taken care of we could -" He rallied. "Figure it out together."

The fact that he was asking whether she had feelings for him rolled around in the scaffolding, ricocheting off delicate supports.

She hadn't thought that she could use their personal relationship to get closer to him, hadn't considered it at all. Joshua had become someone she went to for comfort as well as for information, but of course he had - he was the only one who knew her situation.

Her brow furrowed. "This isn't exactly the time."

"I'm sorry. I just...needed to say it."

"Well I need to get the data that I have out, of here and keep my friends from becoming more like science experiments than they all ready are, not to mention the Alpha..." She hadn't thought enough about the Alpha. There was no way to get him out without the Director and Internals knowing.

"When we're all done with this," she said, trying for closure or a hook she could use later or a block to steady the scaffolding. "Let's think about it then."

"Okay," Joshua said. He sounded disappointed, or tired. If he had sounded at all exasperated she could have used that as an opening to hate him, but he did not.

"I've got to go," she said.

He nodded. She cut the connection.

She had no where to go.

* * *

The coordinates came in the way hers went out, in a bulky data-packaged disguised as a tight-beam transmission. She looked at the numbers for just a few seconds, knowing that as soon as she left the _Mother of Invention_ she could plug them into her helmet and let the navigational system do the rest.

Two days.

On the first day, she did not speak to Wash. She ached from the fight with Carolina, and thought that Carolina was pushing her team too hard if she'd fought them all cold like that. Maybe Carolina was conditioned not to ache after, but the others were not so perfect. CT noticed that Wash had taken to staying at Carolina's side, as if he was waiting for orders. York, with whom Carolina usually confided, stayed distant from them. Likely, CT thought, Carolina had told him off.

She began to feel an immense, tender pity for the other Freelancers, for their interpersonal squabbles and pains. She entertained thoughts of telling someone - anyone. Sometimes in the dreams it was Wash, sometimes Carolina. But there was never any question that it was a pointless dream. As soon as she spoke her secret, even to one of the AI who were suffering from it, the director would know. He would silence her, console them, and they would believe him instead of CT. Instead of Connie, angry Connie who had always been jealous of the Freelancers who made it onto the leaderboard.

Every one of her actions became a facet of leaving. Every movement could be the last of that type of movement, every footstep could be her last on that bit of deck. She did not hate the ship. She still thought of it as home, and leaving it tore at her.

Leaving Wash tore at her.

On the second day he approached her like a he was a stranger, like she was a perpetrator. It was almost refreshing, how right he was.

"I know what they've been talking about in Internals," he said, and she almost felt her heart stop. She had thought that sort of thing only happened as a metaphor but she felt it jump, some thick, gristly sinew shocked all the way under her ribs.

Wash switched tacks, and her defenses fell in a second.

"Don't...don't do this," he said, and all the strength in his expression fell away.

"Your the one who's acting like I'm a criminal," she said.

His jaw worked, but no sounds made their way to his mouth.

"What do you know, Agent Washington?"

He looked from side to side, not furtive but searching. CT was struck with the idea that he didn't know - that what he had really heard from Internals was that they had been stymied, that they couldn't tell how more and more information was being stolen. She considered telling him that a man far away from a planet she had never heard of had asked her to be with him, just to hurt him, but that would be petty and wouldn't do anything to assuage the mix of guilt and disdain and attraction she felt for Wash.

"There's nothing to know," she lied, and turned away from him. He did not follow.

She went to bed, looked at the sheets, then retreated and took a short, hot shower. When she got out the sensation of touching her own arm was a surprising thing. Maybe her skin had felt dry and greasy a lot lately, but whatever it was about the cool, clean skin reassured her. Maybe it was because she was the only person she could trust, the only solid place to stand. She went back to bed and pulled the blankets up to her chin.

She had done frightening things before. She could do this one too.

She still wanted someone to comfort her about it.

In the darkness with Carolina invisible on the other side of the room and Wash asleep and separate from her (I can't keep doing this, she thought, I can't keep letting him think I'll stay with him, because I might start to want to), no one comforted anyone at all.

Carolina had rubbed and arched her back that night, rotated her shoulders, and grimaced before letting down her pony tail and almost disappearing under her covers. She had never called CT out for not returning to the sparring session.

CT couldn't sleep.

She opened her door and then the other long after lights-out, numbers running around her head - Four days until the transmission could be decrypted if the _Mother of Invention_ caught it on the way out, and one day, Joshua said, until the _Staff of Charon_ was equipped to face her.

She wondered, not for the first time, if Joshua was his real name. He would be an idiot to tell her his real name.

Maine had left a shirt or something on the floor, and CT toed her shoes off after she stepped on it so she could kick it aside with the ball of her foot and feel her way across the cold floor. Wash's half of the room was mostly bare.

She sat down on the floor, feeling the cold through her pajamas, and wondered what she was doing here. Maybe she would stay on this floor forever, watching Wash breathe in the dark (a poetic falsehood - she couldn't see him breathe. He was under too many blankets and not breathing in great gasps He was just sleeping, so still that he could have been dead.)

Maybe her plan had been lurking in the back of her head, her conscious mind unwilling to touch the idea that she would just sit here and then go. She would give him, him asleep and her half asleep, the experience of her leaving that he would never be able to get tomorrow.

But maybe she couldn't. Maybe leaving him would be too much, one step she wasn't willing to take, the one for which her own consciousness serves as counselor and says no, this is the turning point, you can't go back now.

She wanted Wash to sit up and call her name. She wanted him to put his arms around her and say _no Connie, please Connie, please,_ and her name over and over tolling in her head until he knows all the shapes and colors of it, and she would stay.

Maybe she could come back. She would get the data to Joshua and then turn around and go back with the Freelancers, and when the Oversight Committee took the director away she would tell them all that she had been right.

She knew that that was a slim chance, though. There were thousands of possibilities where she would be exposed, or it wouldn't be possible to get back to the team. The end was almost worse when paired with the tantalizing prospect that it wasn't really the end. She had gotten fond of this place: she wanted to smell this smell of the room and the sheets, she wanted to sit on the couch and watch her friends go by.

They hadn't felt like her friends lately, though. They had felt like pawns.

Maybe she couldn't do it.

Maybe she would just stay.

But maybe she could.


	16. Chapter 16

She left Wash's room without Maine turning over, without Wash opening one sleep-clotted eye. The next day, she left the Project, but everyone saw that.

Joshua called her unexpectedly just before she was due to muster, when she was already dressed and prepared for the mission to an Insurrection-held scrap metal recycling station. She gripped tight to the screen in her hand as she ran to the hydroponic garden, lights and creases in the wall rushing past her as she held the screen close to her chest. She only had time to dash behind a corner, no more stable than when Wash had found her, before the call would have expired. When she picked it up she didn't even speak, instead berating herself and looking back and forth for whichever Freelancer would surely come to witness the risk she was taking.

"Something's come up," Joshua said in a rush. "You need to know. The Charon Corporation isn't just looking for your Director."

"What else?"

"Alien artifacts. We had that Engineer for a reason, Connie. Now we think we've found something else. A mining ship picked it up and sent it to the recycling station, the same one you're about to attack. We arranged to make our mission loud enough for the _Mother of Invention_ to pick it up, so they'll bring you right to us."

"That's already done. What do these artifacts do?"

"Lots of things. Some mirror human AI technology so closely that it's eerie," Joshua said.

"So the director might want them."

"That too."

"You think this is the final piece of the puzzle," CT said.

"I hope so. We're ready."

"I'm ready too," she said, meaning to sound impatient. He should have known, she thought, that calling her this close to their second in-person meeting was endangering both of them.

"Good," he said. "And Connie -"

Frightened and hurried, she cut the signal.

She had made digital preparations for her departure as well as physical ones: closing her back doors into the _Mother of Invention_ 's radio, making sure that even if the director knew what she had done, he did not know how she had done it. Now she quickly had to go back over some of her erasures, cutting the links this last communication had created.

The more she thought about Joshua's words, the less sense they made. An alien artifact had been brought to a UNSC station and no one had confiscated it? There was something missing here, something she should have understood a long time ago.

She stayed stiff and quiet as the predicted mission to the recycling station progressed, answering South with what little sound she had left in her. Wash shook and teetered underneath his jet pack but CT felt like there was a gyroscope inside her keeping her trajectory straight, pushing her forward to an inevitable cold destination. She hoped to be coming back to the _Mother of Invention_ as soon as she could. Space would look the same in the other direction.

When the shooting started, she she took off, back through the force field into the silence of space.

As she ran along the top of the space station she heard maybe the same cadence of words in her head that Wash would be hearing in a few minutes or hours or days. She had snatched her name away from him and now she had taken his too - _Wash Wash Wash_ repeating in her head until it became meaningless.

When she got to the hatch in the ship she fell down and switched her flashlight on. His name faded into the back of her head as if she had passed through a force field that did not allow it. Maybe it was floating out in space somewhere. She had moved on to other things.

She had to find Joshua and get out of here alive.

The Freelancers would really be after her if they caught her now. Thankfully, York wasn't in the ship any more. She had hoped not to encounter him, had been just as relieved as she had been frightened when the director had reported that York had been spaced. CT's back prickled as if they were watching her. She thought of Carolina's helmeted glare and the silver gleam of North's sniper rifle, the wicked way South could shoot. Funny how you thought about your friends' firepower differently when they were your enemies.

Except, no, they were not her enemies, not even now. The Director was, but the Freelancers-

She was saving them.

She pushed thoughts of them out of her mind and, following the path that Joshua had sent to her last night, found a closed door.

The first Charon corps she found attacked her. They hadn't been brought into Joshua's confidence. He had warned her about this. It would have been too much risk to tell everyone. Instead she disabled them, crunching two helmets against heads that would scar in a split kick that downed both at the same time. She had one moment to feel proud of herself, to feel a rare love for her own stocky legs in the heavy, drab armor.

The moment she began to feel winded she activated her hologram, stepping to the side of the attacks, flicking out of the corner of her own eye. What a gift, she thought, to be able to step out of your own skin.

When she got to the Leader she pointed the snub-nosed pistol at him too for a moment, because it felt natural; she had taken just a half step to get here, and she could shoot him right now if she wanted, if she really wanted to go back -

"I was worried about you," he said, and she saw with disgust and awe that he would mobilize the whole base for her - but wouldn't it have mobilized anyway at the moment the Freelancers landed? "Didn't think you'd be able to get away," he said.

She lowered the mouth of the gun. "You don't know the half of it. They stepped up production." It was easier to deal with things like Maine's implantation when she described it as if it was a routine, but her glibness, and the way she almost sounded like the director, surprised her. She hadn't expected to say that. "Here." She dipped into her pocket for the data chip, kept the gun in her less certain left hand.

"This ship was captured by the enemy," she said, stumbling over the words, realizing the director must have known more about this and been threatening a skirmish against the Charon corporation on the recycling rig for a long time. Perhaps he had started after she had siphoned his system. She was looking downhill now and starting to roll too fast to brake. "I'm surprised there's anything left in the data banks."

"Not everyone follows protocol. You should know that better than anyone," Joshua said. She glanced at him. If that was a dig at Wash, it had struck hard.

"You really think they found another artifact?" she snapped. "How could nobody have discovered that when they were processing the wreckage?"

"They didn't know where to look. And they didn't have what you have."

She looked at the data in his hand. That was all she had. That, and, yes, a certain affinity for spotting things.

"Watch this," he said, and turned to the console next to him. After a few keystrokes, a full-color camera feed opened up. CT moved over to Joshua's side. It took her a moment to understand what she was seeing on the screen: the image was a chaos of machinery and people. Then she identified Carolina, who nearly cleared the room as she leapt over and around a Warthog spinning in zero gravity.

"I didn't expect that," Joshua said quizzically.

"What?"

"The loss of gravity. But it doesn't matter. They won't reach us."

The Warthog fell back to earth, and in the suddenly revealed length of the hanger CT saw Wash crouched by the side of the bay, the yellow flashes of his shoulder and forehead plates giving him away. She picked out other Freelancers one by one.

"My transponder is floating on the other side of an asteroid field," Joshua said smugly. "They'll figure out they're on the wrong scent soon and they'll be right where we want them."

"What's over there?"

"The _Staff of Charon_ , and its strongest armaments."

"Which are?"

"Nuclear."

"You're dropping a nuke?"

"Yes."

CT drew in a breath. She was not used to praying but imagined that it felt something like she felt now, a reaching out without any expectation of receiving an answer back. She glanced back at the screen. The Freelancers were leaving. Wash and York had hesitated at the edge of the hanger bay, sitting there are casually as if they were in the barracks, until York reached out a hand to pull Wash up.

"Time to get out of here," Joshua said.

Still watching the screen, CT could barely hear him. She looked at the brown metal wall to her left as if she could see out into space and better judge how far the Freelancers were from the concealed ship.

"You too," Joshua prodded.

CT dragged in a breath that only gave her a tiny respite. "I can't. Not yet." _I didn't want to go. I thought I was ready. But I was hoping all the time that something would make it easier for me to stay than to go._

"If they weren't onto you before, they _definitely_ will be now," Joshua said. "Come with us, Connie. I'm not gonna lose you over this."

The words echoed. _Not gonna lose you._ As if it was personal, as if what happened to her mattered.

The _mission_ mattered, and if she tried to go back to the team now they would all know where she had been. Wash already suspected so much.

For a moment she fantasized about berating herself in front of them, talking about how she had wanted to hack some computer inside the station and help the mission that way, and telling them how she had failed utterly. It would match their vision of her.

If she went out now, though, she would most likely be caught in the nuclear blast. With one last glance at the live image now empty of everything except crumpled metal equipment, she marched away after Joshua, pushing her fear and horror back, holding her head high.

The _Staff of Charon_ was wedded to the rock-breaking facility by a short airlock. Joshua rushed inside, CT following.

Katie moved toward her immediately out of the next hallway, her hips swaying with each heavy step. CT recognized her by her yellow, feathery hair, and then her voice. "You're back," she said to Joshua. She walked like she was going to start a fight.

The leader glanced between Katie and CT. "She'll show you around." He hesitated. "I'm going to be honest about this because I think you'd want me to be. She'll be watching you. We can't let you walk around alone. People here won't...trust new people."

"They won't trust a Freelancer. I'd expect nothing less," CT said, but that wasn't really true - the Insurrection _owed_ her too. She didn't want to be here. She wanted to go home, but home wasn't Rhode Island or the _Mother of Invention_. She wasn't sure what it was. She made nervous taps with her fingers against her moulded-metal holster.

She said, "Listen, the next time I see the Freelancers, Agent Texas will have received the data I left for her. The Director's greatest attack dog will be on our side."

"I'm not sure how many of them survived." Joshua laughed quietly. "And anyway, how do you know she'll be on your side?"

Was Allison's face under that black helmet? How much of her was left? CT said, "I'm sure." She changed the topic, shuffling her thoughts around to find the one that needed to recur. "Did we even get the artifact?"

"I'm don't know yet." He sounded angry at himself now. Maybe he was wondering if the question was revenge for his gloating comment about the death of the Freelancers.

(Maybe it was.)

A strange sound, like a buzz of static, filled the ship before CT heard a booming sound that she recognized as an explosion.

"That's it," Joshua said. He sounded pleased. CT looked toward the source of the sound, her eyes widening, threatening to stay that way so long that it hurt. Which of the Freelancers had escaped the bomb, and which had not?

Instead of obsessing over that and dwelling in the sadness that would surely follow, CT switched her gaze to Joshua, still unblinking. The ship's engines rumbled and hissed, and he said, "The pilot just radioed me. We've jumped to slipspace."

CT stayed her own course. "Show me all the data you have on the artifacts. I'll compare it to what I have on the AI, and call the UNSC. We need to put the Director on trial, now."

"I thought Katie would show you around."

"No. We're both here to take down the director, right?"

He sighed. "I'll show you the artifact."

"We'll want to examine your armor and that ability too. What is it - a hologram?" Katie said.

"Later," Joshua replied, and CT held her tongue.

As they walked, he explained. "We found this on a colony planet where Charon was building a cryogenics factory - our first hard target that the Freelancers actually attacked, I think."

He lead her to a lab near the stern of the ship. It had the same dark silver walls as the hallways , with computer screens hung from dollies and wires snaking across the floor in rat-king bunches. Blue light reflected off his helmet as Joshua looked down at a silver half-sphere encased in rock.

CT walked around the examination table on which the object lay. The table looked like it had come from a medbay. "These cavities are...it's like this is meant to be filled with something, or to adapt to clamp onto a different part." She reached in, tapped a bulbous blue half-sphere.

"There are ports in there that aren't all that different from UNSC FIF tags," Joshua said, sounding more and more proud of himself as he spoke. "They even have the same amperage."

"So humans and aliens developed parallel technologies at different times..."

"Except these are older than the aliens that the military is fighting now. This would be an antique to them."

"Okay, so our devices can interact with their old ones." It was fascinating, her mind starting to swim with images of lost civilizations and ruins, but she wasn't sure how it was relevant to making sure Alpha - and Theta, and the rest - were not used for any more experimentation. "What does this have to do with AI?"

"I don't know..."

"The FIF tags." It came to her quickly. "The director modified those tags just like the UNSC does for Spartans. And the director used an alien to break Alpha apart. This has all got to fit together somehow."

She moved around the table, looking at the artifact from all sides, feeling Joshua's and Katie's eyes on her. A moment later she shook her head. "This isn't the most important part. I need to get my data to someone at the UNSC who won't take a cold look at it and leave it for another scientist to figure out ten years later. I'm going to get in touch with the Oversight Committee." She looked at Joshua. "Do you know anything about them?"

He shook his head. "No? I'm a security chief. I was never even _in_ the military."

"Then I'll look it up."

"Okay." Joshua paused. "But first - we need to examine your armor."

"Why?" CT said.

"It's one of the greatest advantages the director has over us. Our suits don't seal or take hits like that. And didn't you say yourself that the AI interface with the suits?"

"Yes. The director always emphasized that the suits and the AI weren't supposed to fall into the wrong hands."

_Although, half the time he framed it in the honorable way - don't leave your teammates' body behind. I should have known he was doing that just so save money and keep the AI a secret._

Joshua stared at her, businesslike. Assuring acquisitions. "Do you need some kind of equipment to take it off?"

"Sometimes. But there are ways around that," CT said. They had all figured out the shortcuts, like removing the arm pieces last, to preserve the arm strength needed to lift the rest.

Katie and Joshua turned away like there was some sort of spectacle to CT shucking the armor and piling it in a corner next to a snaggle of cords climbing the wall of a desk that held a monitor. The ugly helmet, she faced to the wall after its stare turned a little too bright. She tried not to think too hard about how her expression looked, thus shown to the world. Even when she felt neutral, she looked angry.

To their credit or hers, Joshua and Katie did not comment.

After that, it was almost easy.

The UNSC had channels set up for this kind of reporting, channels she wouldn't have been able to access under the director's eye. Since CT had looked at the Oversight Committee's website before, she just came at the same place from a different direction and submitted a classified ethics complaint through the UNSC, using codes that had been drilled into her in intelligence training. She went through back door URLs she had also learned there, and addressed her message to the Oversight Committee created to follow up on reports of ethics violations. A sidebar offered her information about whistleblower reprisal and legal action. She wondered whether she and Joshua would last long enough to need it.

CT sat at a console in the lab, with Katie and Joshua looking over her shoulder. The woman folded her arms. Joshua reached out and touched CT's shoulder; she could barely feel it through her under suit but she recognized the scrape of armor against thick cloth. His grip was strong. When she ignored it, he pressed his palm against her shoulder and let her shrug him off.

**To the representatives of the Oversight Committee.**

**Doctor Leonard Church, Science Officer of Project Freelancer, has been conducting unauthorized experiments up to and including the splitting of an advanced artificial intelligence program and creating new ones from the split. His reasons for doing so are personal and are detailed in the attached files; nevertheless they do not represent anything beneficiary to the UNSC at large. He has been sending his troops on increasingly dangerous missions against employees of the Charon Corporation, after falsely accusing those employees of being Insurrectionist soldiers in order to coerce the Freelancer agents into participating in their downfall. I've been collecting data about Project Freelancer. I never could shake the feeling that something was wrong with the program.**

She blinked, felt but did not see the people looking over her shoulder. She had written the letter quickly, not knowing whether or not the formal tone was appropriate. It certainly got the message across.

She wrote her real name underneath, and 00572 84952-RT, and Specialist MOS-29E. Read the letter over again, wondering whether she had ever been taught how to draft an exposé and forgotten.

Joshua had fed the data chip she had given him into the computer, but walked off in the middle of her composition. "Where did he go?" CT asked Katie as she attached the full suite of the director's data.

"He controls our troops. Was probably called away to run the place."

CT did not reply. What she had not written was that she had sequestered all of her righteous anger away behind the professional words. She had chambered it like a bullet and she would use it later when the unsuspecting target would walk in front of her hiding place. Those words, she kept to herself.

"Where do you want to go?" Katie said.

CT looked up. "I want to see how your operation works."

"I'll only show you so much," Katie said as CT pushed back her chair.

"Take your precautions," CT said, not kindly.

Katie turned her back to CT and walked out without checking to see whether she was being followed. When CT tailed her, the other woman started to talk again. "The bridge of the ship tells you as much as you'll get here. Real headquarters are...somewhere else."

"In the building we blew up in the city?"

Katie hunched her shoulders. "Not any more."

"I didn't know what we were doing at the time," CT said. "He never told any of us what the missions were for. That was part of why I had to put so many puzzle pieces together."

"That seems a good way to drop your people into a situation blind."

"It was. There's a _reason_ why I left."

On the way, CT got her first view of space from the _Staff of Charon_ through a tiny window. She felt the skin of her back prickle as her muscles tensed. Somewhere out there was the UNSC, waiting for her to reveal herself to them. Admiral Margaret Paragonsky would be on the lookout for Leonard Church after this.

Paragonsky had not exactly been CT's hero, but she had skipped right over Lord Hood and on to Paragonsky in her first few looks at the military's hierarchy in social studies.

A few minutes later, Katie opened a sliding door and shifted forward into the bridge. It was not as large as the _Mother of Invention_ 's prow with its dramatic overlook. This bridge had a console across the front for two pilots and a central navigation console bisecting the room. Another door on the opposite side probably opened onto a parallel hallway, CT surmised. In addition to the pilots there were two navigators paying close attention to glowing green screens.

"Where are we going?" CT asked.

"Our base of operations."

"Charon central."

"Not even. The security forces operate out of a central base, not any one Charon operation. You could say we almost operate like freelancers."

CT did not laugh.

"What do you think?" Katie said.

"It's...nice."

"Is it what you expected?"

"Not exactly. I don't know what I expected. Who runs the Charon Corporation?"

"There's a board of shareholders. Do you want to meet them? I'm sure they're happy that someone's stopping the terrorists posing as UNSC from causing a media disaster for most of civilized space."

"No. Not unless they want me. I have too much else to do."

"Good. It's easier that way," Katie said.

CT turned to look more closely at her. "I want to call my parents. Can I do that?"

"I'll be watching you. Don't mention you defected. Don't you dare say 'Charon'."

"Fine."

While she watched CT open the message Katie made the same nervous gesture that CT had before, tapping the ammo pack at the side of her leg.

CT's own screen name, her own communication program, gave her flashbacks to high school. Funny how different people used computers in different ways, even though only one was so obvious to her. After repeated calls, neither of her parents answered, through, and CT decided to leave them a video call. Her own face appeared in the bottom right of the screen, and the first words that came to her mind were cliche reactions to her own wide-eyed appearance. She had to remind herself that this was not a confessional, although nor could it be a promise that CT would soon come home. She imagined her mother's face, that woman who for the want of sun dapple on a leaf had lost her career as an artist. Both of them were inside a different storybook scene now, darker and more constricted.

"Hi, mom and dad. I haven't talked to you in a while and I wanted to let you know that I'm okay. We're going to be just as busy as we have been over the next few days so if you don't get me at the first call don't worry. I have a lot to tell you. Tell me how downtown is and what the weather's like. That's all."

Katie looked up at her, just waiting.

CT stopped the message, sent it, turned around to lean her elbows on her legs and look at Katie.

CT said, "Why did they pick you to follow me?"

The other woman tilted her head. "I'm a hand-to-hand combat specialist. There's not much else for me to do in slipspace."

"You're their only specialist?"

"I was a mercenary before I joined Charon. Let's just say I know a bit more about dirty fighting than a lot of these guys. They're ex-bouncers, cops. I was a bad guy." She paused. "What about you?"

_Me? Before Charon?_

CT said, "I need to send one more message."

She typed it out almost automatically, like she had written the email to the Oversight Committee, all the while thinking: To _Agent Texas, Allison, because I know that I can trust you the most. Not because we were friends, although I hope that we will be next time we meet. I hope we will be comrades-in-arms against your creator. But because you are the one who is going to be the most torn up by this. I and Wash and Carolina will look at Alpha's breaking with distant pity, but you -_

_You remember it. You were there. You'll sit back or not move and all and suddenly discover what you were born for._

_I almost envy your ability to know that._

_Pity that you were born as a shadow of someone's lover. You can't know, any more than I can, what Allison would think about Leonard's actions._

After that she stopped, and she told Texas that she trusted her in the hope that that would convince her. Texas would not be feeling an overabundance of trust once she found out what the director had hidden from her.

Katie watched that message too, but CT did not explain it.

Joshua was gone a long time. It was out of both boredom and convenience that Katie showed CT the barracks, which were more crowded but cheerier than those the Freelancers' had inhabited. The Charon crew had more personal possessions, more colors of cloth. The combat specialist quickly became bored and sat down on a bed that may or may not have been hers. CT stood, feeling like this down time should not be allowed. There wasn't supposed to be any free time. She was supposed to have been panicked with want for more time

Finally, she thought of something to fill it. "I need to get my armor back in order to receive any return messages. Where is it?"

Katie looked up from a handheld game. "In the lab, I guess."

They went back. Joshua and a helmeted Insurrectionist were there, examining one of CT's gauntlets. The leader wasn't wearing his helmet, but CT could see it sitting on the desk near where she had shucked her armor. CT spoke from the end of the table. "I'll need that back."

Joshua looked up, his expression morphing from serious to concerned with a quirk of his lips. "Right now?"

"As soon as possible. If I'm going to get a message back from the UNSC it'll be easier for me to check it from my helmet than from the console. I don't imagine I'll be sitting right there."

He nodded. "Give Frank a few minutes, Connie."

She nodded. He must have recognized the tightening of her expression when he said that name, because he approached her and let the tech go back to his work. Katie examined the armor too. As the man that he had called Frank moved around the table, CT saw that his left arm was missing, replaced with a thin, metal prosthetic.

Joshua moved closer to CT, looking down at her, his tone softening. "Are you doing okay?"

"They didn't call me Connie in the program. I told them not to."

"What did they call you?"

"CT."

"You could use that name if you want to," Joshua said.

"Or I could keep Connie."

_You think Connie started this, and so I'll let you continue to think that Connie will finish it._

It felt right that she still hated that name a little. It was the only Freelancer nickname that sounded like a diminutive.

She said, "No, I'm not okay. I've just defected and I'm on a strange ship with strange people. But I'm not without some information. I looked up this section that...it's called the whistleblower reprisal act."

He had taken her angry speech with an optimistic look of blankness, but now looked more like the alert, businesslike man she had met during the raid. "If you're caught - "

"No, I mean, it might help us. They have measures put in place for people who expose useful information."

"Don't be naive about it, though. Someone at the UNSC might come down on you."

"For what? The director isn't actually with the UNSC, remember? He's operating using their paperwork but he hasn't been going on any mission that they would have paid for if they knew what it was."

"He's been attacking us."

"Exactly! There isn't a war against Charon."

"Then we'll go to a court."

"Yes. That's next, if my message even reaches the right committee. If not..."

"We find another place to hide out."

"We try again!"

"And then, we go somewhere where we can live in peace," he said firmly, and looked over at his teammates. They had both stepped away from the armor. CT picked up the gauntlet they had been examining in two hands, noted the slight chips around one of the textural rivets, and slipped her hand through, from bulbous back to narrow front. The back of the gauntlet cupped her elbow, and as soon as it notched into her bodysuit she felt the weight of it halve as it gave feedback to her muscles to support itself.

"We have to try first," she said, not wanting to think beyond that to anything else. There was enough going on now.

While she dressed he glanced back and forth to Katie, and then began to engage the other man in rapid conversation about the armor - whether they could purchase something similar, whether they could equip his own armor with a hologram like hers.

"You need a ship hooked up to an AI for that," CT said, stepping into a greave, not looking back. "It's not worth it."

"But you could still use your hologram when you weren't on the ship," Joshua said.

CT sealed her last piece of armor around her leg and looked up. "We were all authorized to use our abilities before we left for the mission. The people on the ship keep tabs on us. They make sure we don't overheat and that nothing goes wrong. It's possible to use the enhancements without an AI - you saw it yourself when Carolina used hers on the freeway. It's just dangerous."

"What can be dangerous about a hologram?"

"Mine is one of the safer ones. Not much happens if a hologram breaks. But imagine if Carolina's speed enhancement pushed her so hard that it broke her legs, and still kept running. Or North...ending up like Utah."

"Utah?" Joshua asked skeptically.

She put her helmet over head. "You don't want to know."

"Come on. What happened to Utah?"

_What happened to Georgia?_

It had been such a cruel joke for South and York to tease Wash with that question. They had been really saying that it was funny that someone was dead, and funny that Wash was afraid.

There was a trace of laughter in Joshua's voice also as he spoke the strange sentence, laughing too at the Freelancers' names.

CT rounded on him. "His shield removed all the air inside it and nearly suffocated him. It was horrible."

Joshua widened his eyes. He didn't seem to know how to react. "That's why we need to get out of here. So more things like that won't happen."

"Running away won't help. That was just a symptom. What happened to Utah was a test gone wrong. A procedure. There's much worse coming." _The AI will just get sicker as they break down. They'll die faster._

Katie had withdrawn her game from its compartment again and was bobbing her head to heavy guitar music, but she looked up when she heard CT's raised voice.

"What are you going to do with her data, anyway?" she asked.

"Find out how to use it to take down the Freelancers," Joshua said.

"And stop him from hurting anyone else."

"I've got a lot to do here," Frank said, not looking up from the table. A three-dimensional framework in the shape of the armor had spread out on the table. Unlike the rest of the Staff of Charon's technology, it looked equal to the equipment that the Director had.

"I'll help," CT said. "I know this equipment better than any of you.

"You might want to get some sleep while you've got the chance," Joshua said.

She looked up at him. "Before we get to Charon central?"

"Yep."

"And your people will still be watching me."

He hesitated. Katie said, "Jailer's my job now, buddy."

CT said, "I'll keep focusing on this work."

"I've got to keep an eye on the rest of the ship," Joshua said. "I'll be back when I can."

"Okay."

"Do you need anything else? Coffee?"

She almost liked the concern she heard in his voice, almost could differentiate it from pity. She felt that if she slowed down, though, she would be wasting the time she had. The job wasn't done yet. "No, thank you." She patted his arm, wondered a moment later whether he would read too much into the gesture. "I appreciate what you've done for me."

He left her with a nod.

She examined the Charon tech's diagrams and taught him what he was up against, what he had been up against when York had handed him a bomb. She waited for an alert to come through her helmet, not knowing how the UNSC would try to get in touch with her, or whether they would go after the Director first.

CT could not relax, not under those eyes on in a strange ship. When there was no more to do, when she had told Frank all she could about the armor, she sat against the wall next to Katie, waiting for the ping of a message.

The silence darted back and forth through her head, just beneath her notice.


	17. Chapter 17

**November 5, 2550 10:45 a.m. [EEST]**

**To the herementioned agent of Project Freelancer :**

**It has come to our attention that the matter previously discussed may be of interest to the UNSC, relative to ethics code 52 section B, known colloquially as the Mortal Dictata. We also believe that this may tie to the case of one of our high level military assets, which went missing some weeks ago. The attached files will be given thorough examination. In regards to the ethics case, please notify this office of your location if you wish for extraction. The war is dire, but do not think that we neglect those people on the ground who are doing good work.**

**Such requests may take three to five days to process.**

**Yours truly,**

**Malcolm Hargrove, Assistant to the Oversight Subcommittee Chairperson.**

* * *

**November 5, 2550 11:02 a.m.**

**Assistant Hargrove,**

**Thank you for your response. Has the chairperson been notified? I would rather rendezvous and work together than be extracted and removed from this theater. How soon will you be able to move against the ship?**

**We took the alien from the tower. I was part of that team.**

**Move fast.**

**November 5, 2550 3:43 p.m.**

* * *

**Agent Connecticut,**

**Three to five business days. I have sent a message to your Dr. Leonard Church, informing him of the severity of his transgression. This office will do all in our power to assure that the stolen asset is returned. The theft of the Alpha AI is more egregious even than the further experiments inflicted upon it.**

* * *

The _Staff of Charon_ was refit at a small spacedock above a colony world. Looking out, CT thought that the spindly arms of the aging dock looked liable to drop it. Men and women in Charon-branded uniforms repaired, with solder and steel, the hole that York had fallen through. Others performed routine checks, making sure the ship was sealed and stable, doing all the things that FILSS had done on the _Mother of Invention_ with less verve and less error.

Katie had gone down to the planet already, leaving CT alone with a tall, helmeted Insurrectionist who did not trust her. He held his weapon close and did not fidget. Joshua had ordered his entire special forces team down to reinforce the security on an established Charon shipyard.

An excruciatingly long hour later Joshua walked toward her with his shoulders hunched, wiping his hands together.

CT said, "I got a message back from the Oversight Committee."

The leader looked at his oil-smeared gloves.

"Were you working on the ship?" she asked.

"Yeah. But it's nothing."

She furrowed her brow, both impressed with the fact that he had been hands-on with the repairs and irritated that he had not asked her about the message. She could see that his mind was on something else, that his mission to bring the ship back up to Charon-standard operating capacity and her mission to bring the Alpha out of his torture chamber and the director to justice were still just accessories to one another. The search for the second alien artifact might bring them closer together when they had the luxury of pursuing it.

Outside the window , an I-beam on a crane arm floated not far from the hull.

"We can lay low here for a while," Joshua said.

"Really?" CT did not regret the sharp tone in her voice. "We'll be doing more than that. That second artifact is still out there."

"Okay, but we've got to be quiet. Charon's orders, we've got to quit putting their stuff in the line of fire. We did that once already - " _To extract you_ , he didn't say.

"I told you, I have a message out to the Oversight Committee. They'll help us."

"What did those guys say?"

"They're willing to get me out of here if I want." She held up a hand before he could reply. "Which I don't. But they'll go after the director, and when they sentence him I want to be in the court room. His team might come through for us too."

"They're hired soldiers, I don't think - "

"So I really mean Agent Texas. She wants to know what happened to her."

The leader shook his head. "I'd be just as happy knowing that what happened to her was a rocket to the face. She made my guys bug out on the freeway. Those people don't stop."

"No they don't," CT said. "So we won't either. But we've gotta be smarter about it." She looked at the I-beam, which had now traveled to the right side of the viewport, and shook her head. "Because we're sure not stronger."

"We're not hopeless, either." He sounded calm, neither defensive nor pitying.

"Let's just see what they bring down on us. How soon until we can move?"

"The retrofitting will take a few days at least. There are still contracts to sign - we're lucky Charon doesn't go out to bid on these jobs," Joshua said.

CT said, " You've made it difficult for the Freelancers to find us."

"Yep. This planet is out of the way - remember, even you couldn't trace a signal to our shipyard." Joshua gestured out at the close orbit of the planet.

"That wasn't what I was looking for."

"But still. It'll take a lot of work for those idiots to find us."

He was insulting them, not underestimating them, and CT held her tongue and tried to tell herself that it didn't matter if she didn't call him out on the difference. She said, "If this assistant chairman is right, the good guys will be on the move first."

* * *

The air at sea level smelled like brine and greasy water. CT stepped out of a helicopter in full armor, into a brown industrial complex. She could see Charon snipers at high points like prison guards in towers.

Katie was there, out of the reach of the helicopter's wash and shadowed by alley walls, leaning over and sharpening a knife. Other faces CT recognized gathered behind her, the Charon security staff unmasked but militant. The bare-armed soldier's mask was as expressionless as the mouth of his gun. The constricted patches of bare dirt stretched out, drab even compared to the blue-black interior of the _Mother of Invention_ ; the twins' purple armor would have stood out here, a bright display among all the predators. The soldiers' glances were suspicious, and CT saw Katie shape words she could not hear.

Of course, they should be suspicious. CT had betrayed her people and therefore it was likely that she would betray these people too. Not out of anger but out of dismissal, a repeat half-objective recreancy. Charon had once owned the Engineer alien too, of course. The director had not been the one to put it in the box - he had only named it after a vessel for the dead.

Waves moved by the shoreline, and CT thought she saw something solid floating out there: a piece of trash, maybe, but the way the light shifted it looked liked metal. A moment later it was gone, leaving her with a suggestion of white and the distinct shape of a helmeted face.

"What is it?" Joshua said.

If someone was watching them, what then? It might have been one of Joshua's own people. CT could be wrong.

She had been right before, but the sudden certainty of her own fallibility surprised her with its intensity. There were other tasks to complete, too - now that she had found the director's data, getting it out into the world was more important than getting it away from the microcosm _Mother of Invention_. "It's nothing. Come on."

* * *

**November 6, 2550 11:38 a.m.**

**Assistant Hargrove,**

**I disagree with your assessment regarding the ranking of the director's crimes, but ranking is not our primary concern. Please inform me on any further developments.**

**Agent Connecticut**

* * *

"We're going to a desert."

CT was holding a datapad, looking down at thin, green topographic lines on black. The location of the second artifact felt like a sign to her. She had always thought there was something impressive about the desert. It resisted things.

"We'll need extra rations, supplies of water. That stuff's heavy..." Joshua said, brushing her off, moving on to something more important. She could hear impatience in his voice and darkened the screen, looking instead ahead to the doorway they were approaching.

"We can work that out," she said. There was something mythic about deserts, something that placed them in the canon of Americana, that tied them together with deep space and Freelancers and everything else. A geographical free-association. How did that folk tale go - John Henry, who raced against a machine.

"My team will pack the equipment we need. Heavy loaders, armored trucks..." He reached the door and typed in a security code. She watched his armored fingers and the back-and-forth motion of his wrist to learn the code.

Deserts had both weight and impermanence, CT thought, and then stopped because the door was opening, letting in the metallic smell of the camp by the sea.

"Right," Joshua said proudly. "Connie, this is our defensive team."

There were human shapes there under backpacks and helmets, but at first the two looked like walking turrets. When they saw her they looked up, whirring. CT stopped, narrowed her eyes, looking for bolts. Were these the Charon equivalent of Beta's metal shell? Cruder, humanoid robots?

"Are they...okay?" The twin figures - almost twin - shuffled and cooed.

Joshua strode into the room, looking around at the juggernauts and the simple accouterments of a kitchen. "Do you need anything?" he said to the pair. "Coffee? Do you...drink? Okay. Stay comfy."

One of the gunners turned, and the barrel of the chain gun, painted like a smile in garish, carnivale yellow, knocked a plastic jug of water off a bench. The figure took a knee and tried, patiently, to shovel the puddle back into the jug. The other one lumbered from one side to another, looking over its companion's shoulder without seeming to understand that it could go around.

"They fidget," Joshua said, then muttered to CT, "There'll be plenty of movement later."

After that he left quickly, shutting the door behind him.

CT looked at him like she had him cornered."Why did I need to see that?"

"You didn't. I just needed to check on them." Joshua was nonplussed. "Thought that you might want to see."

She turned away. "Now I've seen."

* * *

**November 8, 2550 9:56 a.m.**

**To Agent Connecticut,**

**Please forgive the lateness of this correspondence, as there have been some concerns regarding priorities within our offic e , which will be mitigated shortly. You will be informed of any matter deemed relevant to an agent of the UNSC, unless you wish to be extracted and treated instead as an informant of our office, removed from combat duty but privy to some of the more sensitive matters regarding this case.**

**Chairperson Michael Vanstein.**

* * *

**November 8, 2550 10:15 a.m.**

**To Michael Vanstein,**

**It sounds like your office is telling me yet again that I need to come out of the field to come into your confidence. While I recognize the risk inherent in my work, I find it essential to have an agent on the ground at this time so as not to lose touch with the forces actively working to prevent Project Freelancer from despoiling their livelihood on the whim of a madman.**

**I hope that you will come to understand.**

**Agent Connecticut**

* * *

The Pelican came out of nowhere. Angel wings indeed.

On the screen, a fabricated approximation of the artifact in the desert glowed.

CT stood in a low-roofed bunker beside Joshua as she watched her team fall out of the sky. Her first instinct was to act, to be the front-line soldier, but she was not that anymore. She watched other Charon people rally, pointing guns at Freelancers. Maine and Carolina scattered them as if the earth around them was shaking, drove two back, including Katie. On grainy screens, CT saw Wash, North, South, and York split up in the direction of the makeshift Charon vehicle bay.

The director had sent everyone after her, she realized.

The last target that had merited mobilization on this scale was Rhee Sebial.

Where was Texas today?

Maine had been dropped in an orbital pod this time. CT saw a flash of color next to him and another next to York. The fragments were here.

When she saw Wash slow down enough for her to get a good look she did not let her flinch hit her skin . He crouched like a superhero and sent out an EMT blast that flickered her screens but did not darken them.

Through pity and revulsion bleeding as they had often before into hones t y, she said, "They're here. I didn't think they'd find me so quickly."

Words that had first irked her and then stuck in her consciousness like food in teeth resurfaced.

_**The theft of the Alpha AI is more egregious** _

_My friends._

_**even than the further sins inflicted upon it.** _

She had a feeling that Hargrove might not see exactly eye to eye with her, but he was working on getting the Alpha out. She had at least one dedicated ally in that.

So many starts, all branching out from right here. Wash would have let himself get lost in them. CT set them aside.

Joshua pushed back from the console even as he spoke into the radio. "It was only a matter of time. Let's deal with this. All hands topside; we are under attack. This is not a drill. Let's go, people, move!"

The hall Joshua and CT retreated to was long and dank. A two-pronged crane moved fitfully beyond the gantries, its operator and purpose hidden. They picked up the turret soldiers from the kitchen on the way. Joshua had pulled a fire axe from the wall and magnetized it to his back in the place of a gun. CT had not thought of him as one who would pick a weapon based on the fear it would instill in his enemies, but that he had done.

Then the Freelancers appeared, as sudden as a stooping hawk, three of them at the end of the hallway and lighting up on her HUD at the same time. Joshua put up a hand for her to wait, but she was already drawing her pistols. A flash of color - blue, as a figure fell agile from the ceiling.

"Catch!" Joshua gloated while he threw.

The ax hit Agent Florida in the shoulder and stuck. Florida went limp, fell, and skidded onto the floor. Joshua and CT backed up at the same time. She stayed further away, her knowledge like a shield and a cage all at once.

Joshua yelled, "Right. We've got company coming. Cut 'em down!"

The pair wielding turrets fired, their chattering becoming laughter that ratcheted up with the sound of the guns. They sprayed the rafters for more stalkers, but CT knew the agents weren't up there.

Then Wyoming strode, almost sprawled into the wideness of the hallway. The long sniper rifle looked unwieldy in his hands, but he shot pure - yellow sparks leapt off of Joshua's leg armor.

The leader stumbled, his anger only building. Then he bent, bent again. "Hold this position," he shouted to the gunners, then stumbled behind the corner from which he and CT had emerged a moment ago.

CT raised her voice over the gunfire and glanced at her HUD. Someone else was closing in. She made a choice from the gut and ran two steps to Joshua while the gunners shifted into new positions, their legs like strangely carved pillars. "Are you okay?" He was leaning against a wall, his dark armor almost blending into the shadows.

Before he answered she saw blood on his leg. "Keep going," he started, but after, Tex was upon them.

She slammed into CT, one iron-bar arm hooked around her neck. CT felt herself fall backward, allowed it. She relaxed and landed clumsily on her back armor while she thought Tex is on our side, she has the message -

"I don't think he will be," Tex said. Joshua had braced himself against the wall with one hand and was patting his sides with the other, maybe searching for a weapon. Tex hauled CT off the reactor on her back and held her by the throat, her grip solid, impossible. Omega was a sickly, belly-laughing shadow beside her. One of the gunners had turned, but CT was dangling between them and and Tex now. She hoped they wouldn't shoot. Her legs swung.

She pushed back, trying to swing up or sideways, risking her Kevlared throat to get one good kick in - and another FIF beacon lit up.

"Thanks for the rescue," CT said, and Carolina pointed a plasma rifle's hooked mouth at Tex, her blue armor still steaming and bleeding heat from her enhancement.

"We're here to get her _armor_ ," Carolina said, angry, focused on Tex and barely looking at CT.

Tex sounded tired and frustrated at Carolina's insistence. "We're here to do the job."

Joshua was shouting in CT's radio, "Connie, Connie, get back here." He'd escaped down a passage with one of the gunners - CT could see them melting into the darkness on her right.

Carolina had gone after Tex before going after Joshua. Why had she done that? Connie wondered, but did not let it distract her.

There was still a combat knife sheathed in the armor at CT's thigh. She drew and stabbed upward into Tex's wrist with two hands. The point jerked between metal bones while broken wire in Tex's wrist opened, sparking. _I'm sorry_ , CT didn't say. The steel grip loosened and CT dropped, backward and messily, tucking into a shoulder roll as the remaining chain gunner opened fire and Tex and Carolina peeled off to the sides of them, right and left, to get out of the corridor of gunfire.

CT dashed into the open space to her left, but she was on the wrong side of the hall now, her back to Wyoming and Florida, with Tex and Carolina between her and the route Joshua had taken. Tex and Carolina danced with the gunner in front of her but got in each other's way, jockeying for the quickest way around.

CT saw Florida stand, roll his neck with a movement that looked disturbingly boneless. She didn't know why he was just standing there now, looking up.

She started to move, less toward him than out away from the titanic battle behind her, when Florida fired his rifle at the ceiling. Yellow flashes hit the crane, and it swung toward CT, then overshadowed her and flew back like a roundhouse punch. Tex and Carolina jumped away as the box held in the crate's tines fell out of the air toward them.

The Charon gunner was not as fast. The box caught him up and swept him toward her. CT ran, arms pinwheeling. The railing came up fast at chin-height and she jumped it, hung like a gymnast in the air above it, whipped her legs down, dropped vertical with one hand around the rung.

"You go after the leader!" Tex shouted to Carolina.

The box clattered above CT, then plummeted, ever smaller. The gunner hit the floor underneath it with a sound like a lobster shell cracking, splattering thick orange goo that was not blood.

CT let go of the railing and activated her hologram at the same time. She landed hand-foot-knee, the knife still in her right hand, on top of the box. Above her, an identical body jumped back over the railing and headed past the gunner toward Texas. Tex shot it, two bullet holes making the hologram waver at heart and knee before it disappeared in a flare that did not quite mimic dying shields.

Along the edge of the hallway, the four Freelancer men looked down at CT. Tex and Carolina had stopped fighting. Their twin locomotive gazes pinned her, and her pulse jumped thickly into her collar as she looked at the open level before her.

She began to run. Metal rounds screamed around her, more following fast. Almost there, almost to a blast door and her brain beginning to register that her breath was starting to come shallow, she radioed Joshua. "How do I seal a blast door?"

He sounded out of breath and angry. "There's a big red lock button. It's easy. You're still alive!" It was almost a question. The door was just strides in front of her.

A figure fell from over the railing. Wash uncoiled not more than two feet from her, legs braced and shaking, battle rifle thin and vicious in his hands. He had stepped one foot on a railing and just jumped it, landing hard with the sound of armor shifting like metal pieces thrown into a pile.

She reached for her pistol with her left hand. He let her wrap her fingers around it and draw before he spoke. "You're not under orders to come back." The fact that he had said you're not registered only after the sentence was spoken.

"Get out of my way, Wash."

"What about what you said in the locker room, CT , about how it's not us, it's them?"

"You are them, Wash. As long as you're doing what the director's told you he has you under his command."

"He's our commanding officer! He's a good man!"

"Are you sure you can tell the difference between those two things? "

"I'm not gonna shoot you..." He nod ded toward Tex. "They might."

"Good to know," CT said, quiet as the breeze over the oily sea , and jumped forward and past him.

She kn ocked the mouth of the pistol against the back ridge of his helmet first, pulling him backwards and off balance before she edged the knife across his stomach. "Move backward."

He almost sounded like he was choking. He moved, though, shuffling less like a captured soldier and more like a boy unsure about the conversation. "We'll find you again," he said, colder than she had heard before.

She withdrew the knife. He almost caught her arm with his, but the flat plates over her wrist slid through the crook of his arm, and she shoved him hard. She stepped backward, saw the square, red button. Wash kicked toward her, just his head turned to look and the rest of his body forming the kick before he turned around. As he swung around, the door creaked into motion and CT rushed backward. The slammed in front of her just as Wash raised his rifle, the muzzle eclipsing the gold of his visor.

CT ran into the darkness. Behind her, York would be starting to work on the door.

"Get me a map out of here," she said to her comm.

A moment later, Joshua relayed her instructions. A map would have been better but the verbal cues were good. "Are you okay?"

She thought of Wash, of his face flushed and pale, of how bright and shocked his eyes must have been under the helmet. That wasn't the face she had faced when she caught him, though; she had only seen the visor, and heard his voice go cold. She said, "Yeah." _Considering the circumstances._

"Come join me in the bunker. We can hold this facility."

She didn't like it, not the idea of turtling down, not the growing sense that there were just two of them against at least six. "You don't understand. They want me. They don't care about the rest of you. I know too much."

The power went out. Small emergency lights showed the geometric shapes of the corridor. Yellow lines along the hallway provided a dim sketch of her direction.

CT said, "If I leave, they will follow me."

"Did you hear that?" Joshua said.

"York and Wash, they must have cut the power. This station is blind." She kept moving forward.

Joshua cursed. CT thought of the _Staff of Charon_ , battered but flyable, sitting serenely just outside the atmosphere. If the Freelancers were here now, what was the _Mother of Invention_ doing to that ship? "We've got to get back to the ship."

"I already told you," Joshua said. "I can't leave them."

Who was he fighting for? His people on the ground, his robotic soldiers? "Most of them are already dead!" She heard her own voice go increasingly frantic, and hated the wheedling way it sounded in her ears. "Besides, if we leave they have no reason to be here. Please, let's just go while we still can."

"Connie, come on, just get to the bunker."

"You promised me we'd survive this," She growled, then realized how that would have sounded if she used just a kinder tone, a softer voice - he would believe her, then, after she had let him hold her hand. "You said we would be together." She forced the words out, but the tone came through, and all the while she congratulated herself, in a small part of her mind, for acting so well, playing to his sensibilities so well. "I have all the information we need. I have my armor. We can take this to the right people and they'll-"

"They'll what, Connie?"

"I don't know, make a _deal with us_. Keep us out of prison. They'll help us."

It was the angrier tone that made him back off, not the wheedling. "Rendezvous at my location." He sounded exasperated: she had the upper hand now. But two soldiers were better than one alone.

"Of course." She ran. The closer she got, the more she heard distant, whispering voices, like other people in the hallway with her. Her radar was dark except for the dwindling yellow dots of Wash and the other men.

The door to the bunker was thick and riveted. CT stood in a hallway opposite it and looked to either side, not trusting her HUD. The fact that Tex's augmentation was invisibility meant that she could be anywhere.

The open stretch of hallway was like a killing floor, far too exposed to snipers or ambushers. CT was thinking fast, though, her heart only slowly coming down from its heavy beat. Maybe the best she could do to get across the hall was run.

She ran, stretching out and looking back and forth fast, her pistol still in one hand and a knife in the other. "Joshua, let me in!"

The door opened. Something blurred past her, and she felt her gun hand vibrate before the pain of the blow registered. She tightened her grip on the pistol, feeling resistance from her aching, stiffening fingers. A moment later Tex appeared between CT and the nearest console,. Joshua stood, stunned for a moment with his hands out toward a keyboard, at the third corner of a triangle between them. CT stepped back, watched as Carolina blasted into view and reeled to a stop at Tex's side, her head hardly coming up to the height of Tex's shoulder. Carolina had traveled from far out of CT's radar to within it in seconds.

"You," CT said, looking back and forth between them, judging the maneuvering room she had in the room full of parallel rows of computer stations. "And Carolina."

Tex was holding a semi-automatic handgun that looked small but heavy in her grip. "CT, you have something that belongs to Project Freelancer, and you know how the director hates to share."

"You two are fools. The director is playing you. Don't you see it?"

Carolina spoke for the first time. CT wondered what she was thinking, how she reflected on what had once been her team. "CT, stop it. We know you've been feeding intel to the resistance for months."

Joshua laughed, cruel, enjoying this. "Is that who he told you we are?

CT said, "They're not the enemy, Carolina. We're the ones working outside the rules, not them. You don't know what the director's done! He's broken major laws. When this war ends, we're _all_ going to have to pay for his crimes." Funny how the Freelancers had been _they_ before, but she hardly thought about her penchant for verbal chameleon work. She glanced at Tex, wondering about the AI riding that body. Tex should know what had been done to her by now. "Maybe some of us are already paying for them."

Instead, Tex said, "You need to stop talking, CT." She stepped forward, pointed her gun at CT again. Out of her peripheral vision, Joshua raised his hands in surrender. The fire axe was laying on the console behind him.

It hadn't been supposed to be like this. The dog tags were still waiting, still sitting there on the dusty surface of a locker shelf.

But if Tex didn't use the locker, or if she had given the data to the director, or if she had read it and felt _nothing_ -

CT would need to prod her, but it was like prodding a bull.

She blinked to the side, activating her hologram. If she stood inside it, just stayed still and waited, it would hover over her like a shell.

CT said, "No. I know what you are, Tex." She pointed at her. _YRemember who you are or be my enemy._ "And I won't take orders from a shadow."

"What did you just call me?" CT could hear, in Tex's voice, the words become as personal as a punch to the face. _The data is still waiting for you,_ CT thought. _There's still a chance for you to become more than a killing machine strapped to a body you don't even get to inhabit_ alone.

Carolina raised her gun. The slatted shadows of the room fell over her bright blue armor like clawing fingers. "You're coming with us, CT. This is your last chance."

Joshua kept backing up, aiming for the ax that the Freelancers couldn't see.

CT made her decision. She had made it long ago and many times, but she would need to make it many more times over the years, she thought. There were tens of thousands of laters looking at her down the barrel of Tex's gun, and this was a decision she would have to re-make, for every her there was - for CT the soldier, for CT the infiltrator, for CT the girl lying on the grass of Rhode Island. "No. I'm not going anywhere with you."

Tex's voice curled. "Actually, we don't need you. We just need your armor."

CT ducked before Tex stopped speaking. She never touched her hand to the ground, just ran, straight at Tex, catching her gun arm under the shoulder and following it around to her back, slamming their shoulders together in a move that left Tex's wrist open, fingers splayed. Tex had patched herself, wound what looked like duct tape around the gash in her wrist, repaired something while CT had been running through the hallway. CT pinned Tex's palm into her back and met almost no resistance.

It was strange to see Tex duck away, arms swinging loose, uncoordinated for once as she veritably fell into Joshua's range. He turned, swung the axe, hit her in the heart with the sound of crunching metal, and Tex doubled over.

He threw the axe toward Carolina, and CT followed in its wake just as Carolina dodged behind a pillar. Carolina raised her gun and CT loosed another hologram as a distraction, hoping the trick would work twice.

It did. CT lodged her knife against Carolina's gun hand, and to her own surprise the disarm worked. The pistol flew across the room. Looking at Carolina's mask gave CT a vertiginous sensation of mirroring or deja vu. The top of the board and the bottom of the board had folded in half and collided, the first will be last, and Carolina expanded a pugilstick in her right hand and swung, then landed a kick to CT's gut.

Only as she pushed herself to her feet meters away did CT recall that she'd been hit in the sternum with the pugilstick too. Carolina was after her again in a second, both hands held up with the stick in one and the other bladed, guarding her chest. CT had time to see Tex pick Joshua up in a wrestlers' carry and slam him to the ground. The room was filled with people and the sounds of metal and absence.

Then she was into it with Carolina again, knife to knife and she had never fought like this before, desperation unlocking something, keeping up with Carolina because CT finally had a cause -

It was only when she was fighting her friends that she found she was good at this.

There was danger in the fact that they had trained together before. Establish a rhythm and everyone and no one leaves openings because they're used to blocking the same kind of attacks. The pugilstick cracked with energy, the wide knife blade glinting silver. CT felt the rhythm and then she felt it break, as Carolina opened up CT's back and then her collar but didn't take the shots. CT felt herself getting sloppy, began moving back so fast she could not stop. A good hit with the knife against the back of Carolina's armored hand revitalized her.

Then the pugilstick snaked around, catching CT once across the stomach and once across the neck. She recovered, stabbed Carolina's arm and hit armor. She cued her hologram, letting it flicker for just an instant and almost falling backward into it while Tex and Joshua thundered by at her right hand. Carolina caught her, though, locked her up, pushed her backward into her own copy. CT saw the image of her own exterior fade away.

She came back toward Carolina feinting, starting low before she pushed her left foot against the air and kicked high with her right. It connected, but only with Carolina's hand up to protect her face. She arced back, ran directly into Joshua and Tex.

CT saw Tex's stomach at her head hight and went for it with her knife, slashing once before Tex jumped backward. Joshua was reeling. For a moment they stood at the four corners of the earth, breathing, resetting.

The Tex crossed the middle line and Carolina whipped the pugilstick toward CT's shoulder.

CT recovered, but her next two good slashes went far wide as Carolina danced around them. Back and forth, they fought with old moves and Freelancer training moves and moves that CT had learned by watching Carolina. Maybe Carolina had learned them from Tex. Maybe -

CT released a hologram. Carolina glanced at it, thinking that CT wanted to outflank her with the phantom soldier, but instead it was Joshua who used the hologram as cover, closing with Carolina. Somehow - CT did not know what Joshua had done - Tex had fallen. She was up again in a moment, though, leaving CT alone at the head of a line of combatants.

The fight went quick, and the fight took no time at all, and CT always felt like she was losing, although it must have been worse for Tex.

Her grip on her goal was fraying. She just wanted to survive, now, but the data was a weight on her hip and a prickling feeling at her back. All those possible futures, piling out of the barrel of a gun.

Carolina disarmed her. She heard the knife spin away through the air with a ripping sound. A second later she saw an opening and swept Carolina's foot. Their armor snagged together and Carolina fell, her hands still up, but caught CT's ankles and took them down together.

CT had already been off-balance from when her last strikes missed, and her hands were floating and empty. When she hit the ground, Carolina rose up in front of her. Carolina who had big breakfasts and woke hours before reveille, Carolina who shared their room kindly and neatly in the beginning of the project, Carolina whose place on the board CT had aspired to take, until she realized that she couldn't.

CT turned and there was Tex, raising a stolen axe.

Beta, who smelled like oil and ozone. One AI augmenting another.

CT dodged them.

She crawled for a minute, became far too acquainted with the shadowy red-lit floor, then stood.

The girl from Rhode Island sent out a hologram. Her hands blurred and became watery reflections as she activated her ability. She ducked out of the way of Tex's strike as she saw her hologram phase into being beside her, the angular brown armor heavily shadowed.

Tex saw a second axe embedded in a console at the same time as CT did. Tex caught it without breaking her step and wielded two blades, holding them back along the length of her arms like wings.

She let the lower blade go from the hip, and ignored the hologram.

CT felt the weight of the axe first, a sudden branchlike extrusion of her body tipping her sideways.

The pain was a terrible pulling and a blotch of color, purple explosions bursting behind her eyes.

The world narrowed around her, teetering, and she kept her balance.

It was just the world that was falling, the red and black corridor stretching up in front of her.

The girl thought about throwing another hologram, but she was dizzy now, and something was hurting and moving in her stomach that should not move.

Agent Texas reared back and hunched again, heaving back and forth through the battle with all the weighty grace of a rattlesnake striking, and the second axe head slashed forward.

For a moment, the girl existed in two places, one real and one potential, both false and projected.

The axe missed, did not miss, missed again, the possibilities fighting it out in her head.

Missed, did not miss.

Missed, did not miss.

* * *

**November 8, 2550 4:45 p.m.**

**To Agent Connecticut,**

**Forgive again the lateness of my reply. There have been disagreements. Your case will be completed shortly. As you may well know, the Freelancer Project is experiencing an upheaval of its own making. It is yet too remote for UNSC response. However, your desire for news is only reasonable.**

**As an agent of some tact yourself I'm sure you will understand when I say that the chairperson of the committee is an idiot.**

**Malcolm Hargrove**


End file.
